Frida Orupabo »Fear of Fear«

For her first exhibition in Mexico, Frida Orupabo presents Fear of Fear which consists of an installation of eight new human-sized collages, created by hand by the artist that will be exhibited in the main space of the gallery. In addition to this, the exhibition will be accompanied by three sculptures, as well as a monumental wallpaper that can be seen behind an installation of green curtains, and a video piece. The title of the exhibition is an allusion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film of the same name. Like the German film director, Orupabo creates complex characters, plagued by contradictions that together generate a melodramatic satire of modern society.

Frida Orupabo's paradigmatic work consists of groups of human-scale collages of fragments of black bodies in black and white that the artist prints, cuts out and recomposes. Orupabo, being a black artist born in Norway, has marked the lack of their representation in public images as the original motivation for her work.

Orupabo's figures carry the wounds of their origins. It is black and white photographic material – from a time prior to Technicolor and the civil rights movements – sourced from online archives for vintage fashion photoshoots, Renaissance paintings, the works of other contemporary artists and many other open sources. Much of this work can be seen on her Instagram profile @nemiepeba. Orupabo uses the possibilities of dislocation and reassembly inherent in collage to relocate her figures in anachronistic situations, attire and poses. The figures are deformed, re-shaped and freed from the confines of their photographic character in a process that turns them into the enigmatic and sovereign protagonists of their own stories.