The Disruptive Potential of Frida Orupabo’s Metamorphic Women

Support for this essay came from the Open Society Foundations Ideas Workshop.

Seeing the female form through the Norwegian-Nigerian artist’s eyes can be jarring. A stack of black wings simply attached to a human face is offered as the fully realized body of a woman, held together with paper pins or something close. The gaze of this biform is direct, as in ‘Ehen?’ or ‘What are you looking at?’ Hardly are the girls and women that Orupabo sutures together alone by themselves with the distant, bored look of the girl in, say, La Mousmé. Whether or not they are alone though, but especially when they are alone, they look like they are waiting or steadying themselves. The air around them is often premonitory. Parts of the girl in ‘Sandwoman’ from the body of work, Things I saw at night, have evolved as if by natural selection toward superhuman, superhero-level musculature. They, Orupabo’s women, are crepuscular creatures. Their newforms realized or wrested from doing time in a world insistent on and dismissive of their private and public dystopias. In what might be her most circulated image, the aged hands of a woman—we identify in error or through social conditioning that she is a woman—hold the photograph of a young boy like a secret. The hands are veined, bejewelled, and storied.

On Instagram where I first found Orupabo who works from Oslo, she treats the photo dump as a digital lab. If the dump—with its treatment of the photographic accrual on our phones as some kind of source material from which we can pick and choose events and experiences for self-curation—is a feminine artform, Orupabo is one of its most surreal practitioners...