Frida Orupabo, *Batwoman*, 2021. Collage with paper pins mounted on aluminum, 114 x 121 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nordenhake Berlin/Stockholm/Mexico City.

NAVIGATING WHITENESS

By Lisa A. Bernhoft-Sjødin

Frida Orupabo’s collages are based on personal archives and found online imagery, allowing her practice to take fluid shape like an absorbent and quickly adapting artificial intelligence, given access to the vast masses of the Internet. She explores her own blackness, and the points where the personal and the political cross paths. She states that: ‘I am interested in how we see things – such as race, sexuality, gender, family, and motherhood. How these concepts are understood and talked about, and how these ways of seeing affect us.’1

Frida Orupabo *A lil help,* 2021 © Frida Orupabo Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin, Stockholm, Mexico City

Orupabo’s Instagram feed @nemiepeba is her creative hub. Initiated in 2013, it mines her own personal archives as well as the vast Internet archives for dark imagery of slavery and colonialism. The feed plays with the notion of power by mixing and remixing personal and political imagery, but reads more like a search for selfhood than a political com- mentary.

Orupabo’s collages create narratives that are well known within the black and brown communities in Norway, though less so to the general public. These narratives expose the stories of the fragmented black body, at the same time as throwing light on the Norwegian condition, where both black and white voices seem to validate the superiority of Whiteness. By that I don’t mean white people, but the position that White culture holds in the global narrative of history and culture. Orupabo is acutely aware of how the White gaze has split the body of the Other into pieces, and moulded and distorted its imagery.

The photo collage (Untitled, 2018), exhibited in Orupabo’s exhibition Medicine for a Nightmare at Kunstnernes Hus in 2019, captures this state of emergency. It depicts a woman half clad in white, her other half exposed. She is standing, her front turned away from the viewer’s gaze, looking into the distance, her feet burning. It is an almost unimaginably melancholy work, exuding a longing for recognition and respect.

Orupabo’s recent but by now widely circulated individual paper cut figures are par- ticularly poignant. Physical and static manifestations of the Instagram feed, they are present- ed as individual pieces hung on the wall. Their gazes look you straight in the eye, loaded with pain and suffering, and transferring this pain to the viewer. They are clad in what looks like delicate white fabric, that conjures up both innocence and burial attire. Their multilayers are held together by paper clips, underlining that fact that these figures are fragmented bodies, easily manipulated and held together provisionally like paper dolls. They combine a variety of imagery to provoke new narratives, to examine and remix the past, to take control of their externally applied objecthood and emerge as autonomous subjects.

Frida Orupabo, image collected from her website.

I want these fragmented bodies, to defy objecthood and transform into subjecthood, but they don’t. Their gazes are not in control, not defiant, not proud, not challenging. The bodies remain objects, and instead of battling stereotypification, they seem to beg to be seen and their suffering affirmed. They’re violated bodies, robbed of selfhood and subjectivity. They reaffirm a readymade narrative of the era from which they derive. The selfhood that Orupabo is looking for is not there. Her figures remain surfaces, with no added internal meaning. Their gazes are hi-jacked by the normativity and neutrality of Whiteness.

Such work might well confront viewers with its spectacle, but it doesn’t challenge them. The fundamentals for this kind of discourse are not yet in place within Norway and giving this power to the White gaze means asking it to revise and rethink its own repositoryof images. This question might either be answered or simply ignored. This type of spectacle might not have any consequence for the Norwegian viewer’s self proclaimed empathy and anti-racism. In this way, Orupabo confirms what we already know: that Norway was never a part of this history. Consequently, her figures represent, present and portray the Norwegian condition with which we’re all brought up; they demonstrate a certain mindset with which we negotiate Norwegian Whiteness and the peculiar masochism that comes with it.

For Untitled, 2018, the work bought by the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Orupabo has taken her Instagram feed into the gallery through an iPad instal- lation. With its cacophonic intervals, Orupabo’s video work remixes the story of slavery and colonialism by combining it with footage of civil rights activists in American and South Africa, igniting new ways of seeing the black subject.

Her work contextualises a dire need for Scandi-Blacks to create a language to, at the very least, start a conversation about the kind of struggles with which we deal in Scandinavia without the masochism of trying either to be invisible to the white gaze or render ourselves as white as possible. As Sonia Sanchez asks in her poetry collection Morning Haiku: how to dance in blood and remain sane?

This text is from Objektiv #19. Published online on the occasion of Orupabo being shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2023.