‘How we construct and understand race is so subtle’
“As a white man you can feel like you’re boxed in,” says Frida Orupabo. “But not in the same way as women and certainly not Black women. It’s this understanding of who you are before you manage to open your mouth.” As she leads me through her Oslo apartment, the Norwegian artist makes things clear with a disarmingly warm smile. “Don’t write about me as a crazy maniac.”
Orupabo, whose enigmatic works reconsider racial stereotypes, has a white Norwegian mother and a Black Nigerian father, who returned to Nigeria when Frida was an infant. “Even though I’m a Norwegian-Nigerian artist, I was born and raised in Norway and Norway is the culture that I know.” Her art, however, asks whether that culture knows her.
Orupabo, 39, whose work will be presented at Art Basel by Galerie Nordenhake, has a distinctive visual language, created by layering and collaging images appropriated from colonial archives — often ambiguous shots of Black women — which are reworked into sometimes fanciful, often unnerving compositions.
On Lies, Secrets and Silence, her largest institutional exhibition to date, was staged at the Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, and Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, in 2024-25. It surveyed her gothic, whimsical interests: her source material includes vintage pornography, Porky Pig cartoons, medical pictures and photographs of combs and black gloves. Her “Big Girl II” (2024), a larger-than-life-size paper collage, constructs a Black woman out of several historical images: a jigsaw-puzzle of skin tones in one figure. The woman looks directly at the viewer. Like many of her collages, it is both engaging and unsettling.
While Orupabo’s vision looks back to Dada, surrealism and pop art — as well as the classic horror movies she loves — her cutting, pasting and pinning has formed a body of work that is both idiosyncratic and born of personal experience.
Today, she is married to a white Norwegian man and the couple have two young daughters. Their apartment is both a family home and a studio. Her working space is a modest and uncluttered box room with just a few cut-outs lying on a table. “It’s not what people expect,” she says. “I’m not poshy-posh. I work on the floor and often in the living room. Sometimes you’ll not see traces of any work . . . The work changes in accordance with what’s around you.”
As she makes coffee, Orupabo explains how her art-making fits around motherhood. “There is always something. If they’re sick, they can sleep while I work, I don’t have to go far. And I like to be close to my coffee,” she says, weighing the beans for her grinder. She places a cup of black Norwegian coffee down next to me, before returning with milk and sugar: “Now you can ruin it.”
She is funny and open but admits to hating interviews. “You lose control.” The unease feels apt: the push-pull between representation and misrepresentation lies at the heart of her art.
Orupabo was born in 1986 in Sarpsborg, a small city some 90km south of Oslo. After studying for a masters in sociology she worked as a social worker, liaising with immigrant families and sex workers. “It was heavy on the mind,” she says. Art was a form of relaxation; she drew and made collages of snapshots from both sides of her family and then started searching online for anonymous historical photographs, all as “a way to make sense of things”.
She began posting digital compositions on Instagram in the mid-2010s, before progressing to making physical collages. More recently, her arrangements have become three dimensional, with images printed on to fabric and metal objects such as gym weights and coat hangers. Found film footage also informs looped video works.
Is her art an extension of her social work? “I know it has a purpose but it didn’t start like that,” she says. “By showing the work and by getting galleries I was forced to reflect on why I’m doing the things I’m doing and to put language on it. You have to frame your own work.”
In 2017, Orupabo was included in Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions at the Serpentine Galleries in London. Since then, she has had solo shows at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York, Rencontres d’Arles and the 34th Bienal de São Paulo. In 2023, she was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.
Curators have positioned her work as part of an ongoing artistic discussion about race. Her works “are not only visually compelling but they also challenge, question and expand how we see the world”, says Claes Nordenhake, founder of Galerie Nordenhake. “Frida’s exploration of identity, history and representation aligns with our mission to champion artists who confront complex truths and provoke meaningful dialogue, something we believe is more necessary than ever in today’s cultural landscape.”
Orupabo’s subject matter and conceptual, equivocal delivery can be difficult for viewers, observes Solveig Øvstebø, director of Astrup Fearnley Museet. The Oslo retrospective saw brutal and sexual material combined and entwined with playful imagery. “It kicks you,” says Øvstebø. “This, I think, is why it’s so effective. Because your guard is down. I wanted her to do her thing, even though I knew some school classes might not come.”
The feeling of not being accepted is something Orupabo has always known. “I remember working as a social worker at a centre where there were many women from Nigeria, and they were laughing at me because I was the half-caste,” she says. “I was doing the same things that my white friends were doing. The only difference was that I was not white. And I think that fucked up my brain a bit.”
She has a close family and good friends. The hurtful comments have usually come from strangers. “How we construct race and understand race is so subtle,” she says. She recalls the moment her now husband introduced her to his father and stepmother. “I brought my friend and she’s white. At first his stepmother didn’t acknowledge me. The first thing she does is to go up to my friend and say: ‘Hi, so you are Martin’s partner?’ She couldn’t even imagine that he would pick me.”
Projections of “otherness” were frequent, she says, even though Norwegians are extremely polite, discreet and proudly politically correct. “It doesn’t have to be that you’re called the N-word or that people hit you,” she notes. “But in these small things, it slips out.”
Although her work remains rooted in the Black narrative, a Scandinavian element remains. “Part of the work is very much linked to my white, Western upbringing. For instance, you will see trousers, shoes and purses: all of these things are really attached to my grandmother and great-grandmother, on the white side.”
At Basel, Nordenhake will present three pieces exhibited at the Astrup Fearnley exhibition, including “Her” (2024), a collage of Black faces printed on to a monumental green-tinted curtain, along with four new works, two of which feature dresses drawn by one of Orupabo’s daughters, here worn by an unknown woman from the early 20th century. In another new collage, “Ghost” (2025), a cut-out cartoonish phallic phantom emerges from a Black woman’s vagina. “It’s a surprise when things come up from there,” she says.
Occasionally, Orupabo feels discomfort at reconfiguring an image of a real person. “Sometimes I will not send works to an exhibition, if I feel like this works for me but it doesn’t work for that context.” The complex concept of the gaze concerns her. If someone objected to her use of their great-grandmother’s likeness, she would “have a dialogue” but “this is part of art, you cannot limit yourself”.
So how would she react if — a century from now — a photograph of her was used by another artist? She erupts into laughter. “I would be pissed.” The vicissitudes of interpretation matter to Frida Orupabo.
Galerie Nordenhake, Art Basel booth S13, nordenhake.com
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