Frida Orupabo

Frida Orupabo (b. 1986, Sarpsborg, Norway) is a Norwegian-Nigerian artist who lives and works in Oslo. She holds a master's degree in sociology from the University of Oslo and worked as a social worker at a center for sex workers before establishing herself as an artist. Her practice — rooted in collage, sculpture, and video — uses fragmented found images drawn from digital archives, colonial photographic records, and the internet to address the representation of Black women's bodies, questions of race, gender, sexuality, and the layered weight of historical violence.

Orupabo began compiling and publishing digital collages in 2013, building an extensive visual archive before the work reached an institutional audience. In 2017, the filmmaker and artist Arthur Jafa invited her to participate in his exhibition A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions at the Serpentine Galleries in London — a pivotal moment that led to rapid international recognition. Her method moves from the screen to the wall: images sourced online are enlarged, printed in tiles, cut out, and pinned directly to gallery surfaces, retaining a handmade immediacy that holds together the work's structural and political fragility. The figures she constructs are almost always Black women, whose bodies have historically been subjected to objectification and erasure within the image archives she mines.

Solo exhibitions include the Portikus in Frankfurt (2019), the Fotomuseum Winterthur (2022), the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo (2025), and the Sprengel Museum in Hanover (2025). She has participated in the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), Documenta 15 (2022), the 34th São Paulo Biennial (2021), and the 15th Gwangju Biennale (2024). In 2025 she received the SPECTRUM Internationaler Preis für Fotografie. Her work is held by the National Museum of Norway and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. She is represented by Galerie Nordenhake.