Let's conclude our exploration of the power of collages in art that started a few days ago, through the work of Frida Orupabo. The artist is particularly interested in the depiction of the black female body in the media.
She therefore employs found photographs and images from her personal archive and combines them in digital collages that she uses to explore race, gender, identity, sexuality, the male gaze and colonial violence.
A self-taught artist and trained sociologist, Orupabo first started uploading and streaming her collages onto social media platforms to intervene in the endless cycle of images constructing the black female body produced by art, colonialism, science and popular culture.
At the 58th International Art Exhibition in Venice images and clips from Orupabo's Instagram feed were displayed in the Arsenale as a grid of nine wall-mounted monitors.
The feed featured artworks, historical photographs, fragments of text and archival documents relating to the depiction of black people across the centuries.
In the Giardini's Central Pavilion Orupabo showcased instead a series of images of black women taken from her digital collages, these images, mounted on aluminium, were cut, reassambled and held together with paper pins reminiscent of paper dolls or shadow puppets.
In these collages the figures confront the viewers with a gaze that often accuses, while their gestures and postures point at the acquisition and assertion of power and the subversion of history. Among the figures Orupabo represented in this installation, there was one who called to mind Saartje (or Saartjie) Bartman, a woman who suffered from steatopygia and who was exhibited as a freak show attraction in 19th century Europe as the "Hottentot Venus".
Challenging popular culture, society and history (think about how fascism considered Africa as a land for masculine regeneration where men could regain vigour, and of exotic degeneration at the same time, which meant colonists, believing in their racial superiority, felt legitimised to abuse local women treating them in inhuman and degrading ways), Orupabo reclaims these bodies, liberating them from stereotypes and tropes and from violence, exploitation and subjugation.
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