Arcade
Frida Orupabo: Tools from my chest at Modern Art
23 May – 5 July 2025, Paris
Modern Art Place de l'Alma Paris 75008
Frida Orupabo’s works are, in some sense, solutions to problems; the problems being that certain images do not exist and need to be created. Working mainly with collage, but also spanning sculpture and video, Orupabo’s work synthesises fragments of bodies to reconstruct narratives and imagine new configurations of subjectivity denied by colonial legacies. More often than not, the figures in Orupabo’s images are Black women, although the categorisation of gender, race and family heritage are not only questioned; they become the locus of her explorations. Mining digital archives mostly online, Orupabo’s process starts on a small-scale, collaging images on screen, but these often grow into much bigger, life-sized characters in the room. Enlarged, printed in tiles, cut out, and then pinned together, Orupabo’s process of combining images retains a hand-made simplicity, which carries within it a sense of possibility for play, experimentation and spontaneity. This liveliness is joined by a depth of difficult emotion held in her subjects – rage, sadness, or desolation, for instance - whose faces stare back, as though to a challenge their viewers to a duel.
Orupabo’s new body of work for her exhibition at Modern Art is partly influenced by the paintings of the African American artist, Bob Thompson. Thompson’s figurative compositions made in the mid 20th century reinterpret the subjects of the Old Masters in enigmatic, vivid, surreal and often disturbing portrayals of collective life. The body is central to Thompson’s work, and his figures – coloured in browns, pinks, blues, yellows, or reds – are often the locus of violence and generational trauma. In a certain way, then, the works are themselves about bearing witnesses to these histories. In parallel, Orupabo’s work offers an act of bearing witness to its subjects, to their possible experiences and the structural conditions under which their lives were or are lived.
Frida Orupabo’s large scale sculptures and collages begin with the colonial photograph. Sometimes, she uses actual images from historical archives, while at others the images she sources from various means – eBay, Tumblr, magazines or B movies – evoke the history of the medium of photography and its role in the violent objectification of non-white subjects under the auspices of ethnography.
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Images © Firda Orupabo & Modern Art
Images © Firda Orupabo & Modern Art