Frida Orupabo ‘‘On Lies, Secrets and Silence’’ at Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, 2025

Built on the edge of Oslo’s flowing fjord to display one of the largest European collections of—often challenging—works by the most renowned names in contemporary art, the Astrup Fearnley Museet seems eminently suited to host On Lies, Secrets and Silence, a dense exhibition by Norwegian artist Frida Orupabo. Ever the explorer in her uncovering of colonial narratives interwoven in social, economic, and political frameworks, Orupabo emphasizes the historical violence directed at Black bodies while honoring their resilience and agency. Through her artistic interventions, she offers alongside her personal narratives a nuanced examination of collective experience, in this case the persistent feeling of outsiderness for people of African descent in Europe—a legacy of colonialism. The show takes its title from Adrienne Rich’s thought-provoking eponymous prose collection On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1979), which likewise takes up themes of racism, history, motherhood, and the politics of language.

The exhibition opens with two captivating pieces, Her (2024) and Them (2024), printed textile curtains that establish the atmosphere of the largest gallery. Their large scales and sensuous materials are gripping. Her draws inspiration from an unattributed 1920s studio portrait the artist found at blackarchives.com of a young Black woman gazing outward, her expression evoking a sense of intriguing ambiguity—neither resignation nor triumph. In Them, we witness an intimate moment in which two women—one Black, one white—share a kiss, their faces partially hidden by an inset image. The scene, we learn, was sourced from 1970s pornography, made at a time when both interracial relationships and homosexuality were subject to severe repression. In both works, Orupabo skillfully employs tight cropping, image repetition, enlarged scales, and/or filtering to recontextualize the original material. These artistic choices prompt reflection on the sources’ meaning and relevance, and encourage contemplation of identity, intimacy, and societal taboos.
 
Next we encounter Big Girl I and Big Girl II (both 2024), the artist’s largest collages to date, each close to three meters tall. Neither grandiose nor diminutive, they seem designed to underscore the subjects’ dignity and significance, inviting closer inspection and interaction. The intricacies revealed from various perspectives provoke psychological reactions of both awe and unease.
 
Cloud of Confusion (2024), also on the ground floor, presents a grid of twelve images in which Orupabo juxtaposes cartoons with sexualized and colonial representations such as a Black tribal woman with her back to the photographer. We wonder: Was this African in an equal power dynamic with the presumably European man who captured her image? A black metallic teddy bear displayed on a plinth in Jumpy Fits and Facial Tics (2024) symbolizes both childhood solace and lurking menace, echoing the artist’s affinity for horror films; she again hints at murderous teddy bears in The Pit (1981) and Imaginary (2024). The linkage of childhood comfort and violence is manifest in the artist’s poignant remark in the exhibition catalogue: “Everything that is sweet . . . can soon be rotten.”¹ There is some humor in the exhibition—Smoking Dog (2024) is an amusing image that literally depicts a canine puffing on a cigarette. Objects I, II, III, and IV (all 2024) draw inspiration from white underwear, a comb, a shoe, and a model of a house—items that, we learn, the artist discovered in her Norwegian grandmother’s home, and thus evoke a sense of nostalgia.
 
Upstairs, Stockings (2024) and Purse (2024) highlight another recurring theme in Orupabo’s art: the reclining female figure. With her unique collage style, the artist disrupts this traditional Western art historical subject, turning it into something fragmented and unsettling. The figures are composed of mismatched body parts in different sizes. The compositions might be read as a critique of a genre that has historically reinforced problematic ideas about gender. Yet these works present a markedly relaxed—not to mention chic and sophisticated—vibe, as the figures appear to be enjoying moments of leisure. Intriguingly, they were created in collaboration with a stylist for a fashion and arts magazine. In the same gallery, the video Over the Edge (2024) features found imagery, including a woman’s face and invasive footage from medical examinations. The work reflects Orupabo’s experiences as a Black woman navigating the Norwegian health-care system during childbirth, raising challenging questions about what is considered acceptable treatment of women’s bodies. What is permissible? What can a patient object to? The figures’ ambiguous expressions highlight the tension between vulnerability and resistance in medical contexts.
 
In Two Women (2021), Orupabo depicts Black women as paper-doll-like figures, held together by visible metal rivets. The figures have a patchwork quality, combining as they do varying skin tones and mismatched body proportions. In this evocation of fragmentation, I am reminded of a remark by Anglo-Nigerian artist Mary Evans during a talk in London. Evans tried to give voice to her experience of moving from Nigeria to the United Kingdom, describing herself as feeling like a “cut and paste”—neither fully one thing nor another.²Similarly, Orupabo, who shares Nigerian heritage alongside her Norwegian upbringing, seems to be channeling this sense of dislocation—this dilemma of biracial belonging, of identities seeping into one another, of the sliding differences between them, and between artist and audience.
 
Orupabo’s consistent use of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imagery she finds in different online archives from African countries is evident in pieces like Untitled Hangers (2024), a sculpture resembling a clothes rack with metallic hangers, on which she has printed colonial-era photographs of Black women’s faces, and Two Eyes and a Pole (2024), featuring a metal flagpole adorned with fabric printed with another colonial image.³ These works provoke critical questions about ownership and the ethics of reusing such photographs. Orupabo seeks to reclaim the power embedded in the images, subverting the dominance of the colonial gaze through appropriation. She engulfs and enwraps historical narratives, reasserting agency over how certain images are viewed and understood.
 
In the final gallery, the video installation House Party (2024) features an iconic image of childhood, the dollhouse, but uses it to examine darker aspects of domesticity. The footage, which is projected onto the dollhouse, captures a house party in 1980s London with predominantly Black guests, juxtaposed with scenes from a horror film depicting a grotesque man assaulting a woman. The visceral revulsion the latter evokes mirrors the discomfort a prejudiced viewer might experience when confronted with Black joy. This stark contrast underscores the artist’s critical commentary on racism. Through spatial installations and expansive imagery, Orupabo challenges viewers to reconcile the contradictions of intimacy and alienation and to confront pressing themes such as colonialism, racism, and gender dynamics. Her works provoke a wide spectrum of emotions—from sorrow to defiance—often portraying fragmented human figures that assert their identities on their own terms.
 
at Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo
until April 27, 2025

Frida Orupabo (b. 1986, Sarpsborg, Norway) lives and works in Oslo. She is currently featured in a solo exhibition at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover. In 2023, she participated in the exhibition Flight at Malmö Konsthall alongside Kudzanai Chiurai and Eric Magassa. She has presented solo exhibitions at Fotomuseum Winterthur (2022); Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo (2021); Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway (2021); Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2020); Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (2019); and Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2019). Orupabo participated in the 15th Gwangju Biennale (2024); the 34th São Paulo Biennial (2021); and the 58th Venice Biennale (2018). Together with Ming Smith and Missylanyus, she presented her work in Arthur Jafa’s exhibitions at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2019) and Serpentine Gallery, London (2017). Orupabo will be awarded the prize SPECTRUM – Internationaler Preis für Fotografie in 2025, and her work resides in many international collections.

Akin Oladimeji is a critic, lecturer and writer. He is currently in the first year of a PhD at University College London (UCL) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. His criticism and essays have appeared in e-flux, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Third Text Online, and Burlington Contemporary.