Frida Orupabo’s practice consists of collecting images from the media and her personal life, which she archives on Instagram (@nemiepeba), amongst others, and transforms into analog collages. In her virtually accessible archive, appropriated images of colonial violence, film sequences from Afro-American media, music videos, art, and images from Orupabo’s personal photo archive all collide, blending her private sphere with the political and public spheres and allowing a distinctively subjective perspective to emerge. In their sequencing, the archival images trace stereotyped representations of race, gender roles, sexuality, and violence, as well as privacy, autobiography, and the public in the media, to which Frida Orupabo not only approaches through her selection but also integrates and subordinates herself with her private photographs and digital collages.While the images are thoroughly decontextualized in Frida Orupabo’s archive, the artist recomposes and layers these found (media) images in her analog collages. Through this process of alienation, she produces new and divergent narratives that play with the meaning of specific image elements. Crops, repetitions, and manipulations all help construct scenes with figures in various bodily and emotional states. Themes such as family (especially motherhood) old age and fairy tales conjure situations such as interpersonal relationships and the varying stages of life.
