Frida Orupabo (b. 1986, Norwegian/Nigerian) is the 2025 recipient of the prestigious SPECTRUM – Internationaler Preis für Fotografie. Awarded biennially by the Stiftung Niedersachsen, this global prize recognizes exceptional photographic artists. Orupabo’s work confronts the Black gaze head-on, exposing violence, sexuality, and politics through the lens of colonial archives. Moreover, it addresses the historical trauma inflicted on Black bodies. Through paper collages, Fridah compel viewers to engage directly with her subjects’ unflinching stares, creating an immersive dialogue about identity and power.
The SPECTRUM prize includes a €15,000 endowment, a major exhibition at Hannover’s Sprengel Museum, and a dedicated publication. The jury praised her “artistically outstanding position,” stating: “Orupabo interrogates the painful flaws of visual traditions through complex pictorial inventions. Her work exposes the violence embedded in colonial imagery while forging new paths of enlightenment.”
Born to a Norwegian mother and a Nigerian father who left during her childhood, Frida Orupabo turned to art to explore her dual heritage. Growing up in Norway, she confronted racialization and sexualization through a colonial lens, shaping her understanding of imagery’s oppressive and emancipatory potential. By reworking archival photographs and films, she dissects her fraught relationship with Norway—a place she calls home yet where her belonging remains contested.
Her current exhibition, On Lies, Secrets and Silence at The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art embodies this tension.
“I want the works to be so large that the viewer is ‘eaten up’ when they enter the space,” she explains. Towering collages dominate walls, embodying what she calls a “soft resistance”—a quiet but relentless demand for visibility. The pieces force audiences to confront raw emotion, acting as mirrors to their own biases.
“The gaze is central to my work,” Orupabo notes in an interview with Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Museum.
“Colonial archives objectify and brutalize. When my subjects stare back, they reclaim power. It’s resistance without words.” By manipulating reality, she dismantles stereotypes of Black bodies in the West, expanding perspectives through layered narratives.
On Lies, Secrets and Silence runs at The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art until 27 April 2025. Explore her full catalogue here.
