LISBON.- The MAC/CCB has opened Cloud of Confusion, the first solo exhibition in Portugal by Norwegian-Nigerian artist Frida Orupabo, presenting a powerful reflection on images, memory, violence and the digital systems that shape how we see Black bodies.
Curated by Marta Mestre, the exhibition is on view from June 3 to November 1, 2026, on floor -1 of MAC/CCB in Lisbon. The show revisits the vast archive of images Orupabo has gathered through Instagram, where private images, mass media, intimacy and violence come into uneasy contact.
The exhibition begins with a gesture familiar to almost everyone: the act of scrolling through an Instagram feed. Orupabo transforms that everyday digital habit into a physical experience inside the museum. In dialogue with the architecture of MAC/CCB, Cloud of Confusion unfolds as a linear path made up of eight moments, echoing the continuous movement between screens that defines much of contemporary visual life.
The title refers both to the digital cloud, where images and data are stored, and to the haze of information, memory and forgetting that comes with it. In Orupabo’s work, images are never neutral. They carry histories, wounds, projections and silences. They also contain what the exhibition describes as an “abyss”: a strange, unstable depth that continues to reverberate after the image has passed from view.
By bringing the logic of the digital feed into the museum, Orupabo turns scrolling into walking. The exhibition becomes a discontinuous sequence of images, interrupted by three-dimensional works that ask viewers to slow down and become aware of their own bodies in space. Montage and editing, central tools in the artist’s practice, are no longer only visual operations. They become relational acts, fully activated only when a viewer is physically present, moving through the exhibition with time and attention.
Born in 1986 in Sarpsborg, Norway, and now based in Oslo, Orupabo works with images found online, which she cuts, rearranges, decontextualizes and recombines. Between 2013 and 2016, she maintained the Instagram account @nemiepeba, a flow of images and looping videos that artist Arthur Jafa described as “relentless” and “incandescent.” For curator Marta Mestre, Orupabo’s eye moves like that of a deep-sea diver, searching both the saturated surface of digital culture and its darker layers for charged relationships between images.
Her work brings together colonial archives, cinema, television, algorithmic systems, violence, motherhood and music aesthetics. Through collage and recombination, Orupabo opens new ways of reading the Black visual imaginary, restoring a form of sovereignty to bodies and lives that have historically been captured, classified and consumed by images.
As the artist has suggested, her works “look back.” They confront the white gaze and question how Black bodies have been perceived, represented and controlled. In this sense, Cloud of Confusion is not simply about images circulating online. It is about power: who makes images, who is seen, who is objectified, and who has the right to return the gaze.
Orupabo’s background in sociology is essential to her practice. She studied Development Studies and Sociology at the University of Oslo from 2005 to 2011, and began collecting images from the internet while working at a support center for victims of human trafficking and sex workers. What began as an online archive later moved into physical collage, where she cuts, sequences, reverses and loops still and moving images.
The results are often beautiful and disturbing at the same time. Her interventions challenge colonial ideas that continue to shape social, economic and political structures, while opening sensitive reflections on race, gender, sexuality and family ties.
The exhibition is accompanied by a public program that began on June 2 with a conversation with curator Marta Mestre, followed by the opening and a DJ set by Arrlomp in the Grand Hall foyer. A Reading and Listening Room, open throughout the exhibition, offers visitors access to books and editorial projects connected to Orupabo’s references, with programming conceived by colectivoFACA and Ícaro Lira.
Additional events include guided tours on June 21 and September 27, a handmade book workshop with EVA Cartonera on July 18, a guided tour with Marta Mestre on September 19, and a public conversation titled MANAS at CCB, dedicated to artistic practices, inclusion, participation and the production of counter-archives within cultural institutions.
Orupabo has exhibited internationally, with solo presentations at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Museu Afro Brasil in São Paulo, Kunsthall Trondheim, Huis Marseille in Amsterdam, Portikus in Frankfurt and Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo. She has also participated in the 34th São Paulo Biennial and the 58th Venice Biennale. In 2025, she received the SPECTRUM International Prize for Photography.
With Cloud of Confusion, MAC/CCB presents an artist who turns the familiar language of the digital feed into something slower, sharper and more unsettling. What begins as a scroll becomes a confrontation with history, visibility and the unstable life of images.
