Frida Orupabo
Plaster Magazine 2025

June 2025
Plaster Magazine

'Orupabo’s collages claw through the digital morgue of colonial ethnography, anthropological debris, family snapshots, softcore pinups, and clinical atrocity – an archive that was never neutral, never benign' writes Finn Blythe

ArtReview, May 2023

Fi Churchman offers a close reading of the artist's frameworks of representation across recent bodies of work, concluding,'In the destruction of the stereotype, Orupabo reconstructs new narratives that centre around, as Campt put it, the ‘possibility of a future lived otherwise’. 

Bonniers Kunsthall, August 2024

Frida Orupabo speaks to Karolina Modig about her process and influences on the occasion of her travelling exhibition On Lies, Secrets and Silence, noting, 'The work has been and still feels like a necessity, something I have to do. I often used the word sane – “I do it to stay sane.”

Oath magazine, January 2023

Quiet like an Oyster: Stephanie Blomkamp reviews I've been here for days by Frida Orupabo, focusing on the artist's use of the gaze. She writes, 'The staring contest between the subject and viewer is an invitation into Orupabo’s world. A place steeped in millions of visuals, churning thoughts, and a direct mission to re-examine the world she witnesses and partakes in'.

Artthrob, November 2020

'Orupabo’s work is both a form of sampling and a repatriation. Her images pay homage to the subjects’ ability to resist the colonial gaze at the time, and now, in the contemporary moment emphasizes their agency and subjecthood. The power of these images lies in the skill with which Orupabo has employed them in the present', writes Annabelle Wienand on Hours After

AFRICANAH, December 2019

Chaos as a way of organising thoughts: 'Orupabo creates food-for-thought in black and white, bringing into the conversation the notion of timelessness and reinforcing the relevance of the themes tackled in her work nowadays' by Raquel Villar-Pérez

Hours After, March 2021

'The beginning is always the body': Frida Orupabo and Elvira Dyangani Ose, An online conversation, 9 October 2020

WePresent, 15 October 2021

'I see anger as fuel in the creative process': Frida Orupabo speaks to Gem Fletcher 'about her hopes that, through her work, she might offer a space where our understanding of gaze, representation and ownership can be challenged'.

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