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Location: Brooklyn
Biography: The Visura (Vē-su-ra: Be seen) Blog features Visura highlights, essays, and announcements including grants, partnerships, events, and open call opportunities and results.
Events
Exhibition: Frida Orupabo’s solo show at Nicola Vassell Gallery, Closed Up Like a Fist
visura blog
Apr 20, 2022
Frida Orupabo’s solo show at Nicola Vassell Gallery, Closed Up Like a Fist, is a visual encounter with the hauntings of the Black Atlantic archive. Drawing from a rich tradition of literary and visual archives that have aimed to salvage Black femmes from fossilized narratives, Orupabo’s exhibition reads as a cartography of Black femme precarity, delicately pinned up by the resolve to survive. Based in Oslo, Frida Orupabo carefully constructs collages of femme figures at scale, neatly layering paper cutouts to create delicate multidimensional compositions. The images that form Orupabo’s collages have their origin in colonial archives, each composition representing a multitude of decades, each figure embodying multiple generations of yearning and survival. Suspended by subtle silver pins that place the composition in a delicate balance between glass and paper, Orupabo’s figures extend outwards like flower petals. The angularly positioned feet form a representation of the ambulatory possibilities of Black femme fugitivity, while the gazes evince the uncertainty of escape, a gendered condition of immobility within the Black Atlantic archive.

- Margarita Lila Rosa, The Brooklyn Rail

Frida Orupabo: Closed Up Like a Fist
Frida Orupabo’s solo show at Nicola Vassell Gallery, Closed Up Like a Fist, is a visual encounter with the hauntings of the Black Atlantic archive. Drawing from a rich tradition of literary and visual archives that have aimed to salvage Black...
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Exhibition: Frida Orupabo’s solo show at Nicola Vassell Gallery, Closed Up Like a Fist by Visura Blog
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