Frida Orupabo is nominated for her exhibition I have seen a million pictures of my face and still I have no idea, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (26 February – 29 May 2022).

Frida Orupabo (b. 1986, Norway) creates photographic collages that take the shape of fragmented, Black, mostly female-bodied figures, exploring questions of race, sexuality and identity. Orupabo, a Norwegian Nigerian artist and sociologist, grounds her inquiry in her own experience of cultural belonging.

Orupabo’s source material is drawn from digitised colonial archives, social media platforms and online marketplaces.  A process that begins online is resolved by hand as she lays one printed image segment on top of another. This reassembling layer by layer is a complex and poetic manoeuvre that simultaneously denounces one-dimensional depictions of Black lives.

Orupabo began posting on Instagram as @nemiepeba in 2013. The platform functioned for her as a personal archive, an expressive outlet and an ordering system. Her collaged cut-outs hold our gaze and invite various readings of the stories and lives of the people depicted, many of whom are entirely absent from the archives. In this way Orupabo invites a consideration of how photography significantly contributes to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence.