Frida Orupabo has her eyes on you. But what does she have to show us? Orupabo is the Norwegian artist who has gone from being a social worker with an influential Instagram account to an internationally acclaimed art world favourite in seven years. On Lies, Secrets and Silence at Bonniers Konsthall is her first institutional solo show in Sweden, after exhibitions in London, New York, and Trondheim.
With collages of found images depicting mainly Black bodies, repetitive films, and a chanted mantra, Orupabo puts her finger firmly on the colonial and racist legacy that governs perception. The overly didactic exhibition text tells me that what I’m seeing is all about home, intimacy, and adolescence. I don’t know. It is commendable and powerful politics, but in the end I’m not even sure I’m capable of seeing what I’m expected to see. What here can I discover on my own?
If no one has written an essay on the gaze in Orupabo’s work yet, it needs to be done stat. There seem to be two levels. Let’s call them the major gaze and the minor gaze. Upon entering the darkened corridor leading into the exhibition, viewers are greeted by the major all-seeing gaze in the grimacing light installation Of Course Everything is Real (2024). It returns in the monumental mannequins Big Girl I and Big Girl II (2024), whose eyes follow us through the large central gallery where the works are punctuated by white cubes and pedestals. This gaze structures the exhibition. It is commanding and on a mission. To me, it seems to be saying: “I see you. I see what you are and what the system you enjoy has done.” Sure, that’s undoubtably true. But it’s hardly news, and the images themselves are familiar.
The other gaze, the minor one, is more interesting and intense. In almost all of Orupabo’s works there is an eye looking out from a gaping crevasse. Something peers out at times with a sense of sadness, rebellion, and resistance, or possibly playfulness and desire that hints at a presence that could resemble a dynamic subjectivity, the layers that constitute a person. The couple kissing who only has eyes for each other in the large photo curtain Them (2024) or the subjugated anus in the mural Lead by the Nose (2024), which nevertheless stubbornly opens towards the window and the reality of the street. This gaze is defiant, as if emanating from accumulated human fragments that have been given new life and now look out entirely on their own terms.
This is an aspect of Orupabo’s exhibition that I really appreciate when it’s there. One example is the macabre Unidentified Hangers (2024), seven aluminium coat hangers reminiscent of busts with prints of Black faces, hanging on a clothing rack. Some look as though they have been strangled; one of them seemingly wonders what she is doing there, while another is perhaps afraid, and yet another one is happy. The work stands out from the rest of the exhibition, perhaps because the artist abandons her iconic paper doll aesthetic. Here we meet these people’s gazes outside the familiar track. They testify to life beyond the stereotypes of racism – and all too obvious anti-colonial politics.
But mostly, the works appear mute. This probably has to do with how their meaning is made in several contradictory and supercharged movements. On the one hand, the viewer is confronted with not only the racism that has reduced living bodies to objects through centuries, but also the anti-racist movements that work tirelessly to ensure that these bodies, these lives, be recognised as human and dignified. On the other hand, the viewer also encounters an ambiguous aesthetic proliferation. The images draw their power from the square smooth form of Instagram, from the disgust, eroticism, and transgression of Surrealism (it’s hard not to think of Luis Buñuel and Georges Bataille, of Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer), from the Anglo-Saxon theoretical-poetic discourse referred to in the exhibition text (Judith Butler, bell hooks, Adrienne Rich, and others), and from the form and history of collage. Just to mention a few of the areas in which the exhibition travels.
Managing to traverse these many territories is usually a sign of density and quality, but in Orupabo’s case, the range results in silence. Yes, it looks elegant. Yes, it’s striking, but I don’t know what to do with it. It is what it is, and I quickly move along. Works drawing meaning from and moving towards so many signifiers creates an appearance of depth. Orupabo takes in a lot, but her collages can’t contain this abundance in their driven and slick form. Her imagery is at once too on the nose, and too subtle in its details. The interpretation indicated by the exhibition text and the familiar imagery overrides the humour, slippages, and openings that occasionally arise in the juxtapositions within the works.
These two elements are, of course, contradictory. Too saturated and too scattered, and at the same time too unambiguous and too prescribed. Here, the materiality of the images and the exhibition architecture might have allowed the viewer to approach the works beyond the manual-like instructions, but the props, the cool white pedestals, the cold aluminium print, lead in the other direction. If the idea is to place the reclaimed Black body on the pedestal of high art, the effect only increases my distance to the exhibited works. The chanting voice in the film I’m Depressed (2024) echoes through the galleries: “I’m depressed… I don’t have peace of mind.” It gets to me, but I quickly shake off the discomfort and become annoyed instead: yes, thank you, I know I’m supposed to be moved. The fact that everything is so precise, so clean, and so perfectly presented displaces the aesthetic experience into straightforward and unambiguous politics.
Orupabo’s references multiply. But I’ve done my homework and feel like I’ve seen everything already. The exhibition appears much like I imagine it would feel to re-read, say, Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1950) three times in a row: with a furious, yet waning anger. The artist’s study of the gaze and the layers that form a person has its strong points, and some individual works are persuasive. But, overall, I look at the collages like I look at my Instagram feed: listlessly. The cutout dolls don’t move my gaze, and I don’t think they will stick.
