AALBORG.- Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg is presenting the first solo exhibition in Denmark by internationally acclaimed Norwegian-Nigerian artist Frida Orupabo, bringing together new collage works in the artist’s largest installation to date.
Titled Get close enough and you can’t see, the exhibition opens October 8, 2026 and runs through May 9, 2027. Created specifically for Kunsten’s Alvar Aalto-designed building, the presentation unfolds through a labyrinthine exhibition architecture that places visitors physically among Orupabo’s works and complicates the usual relationship between viewer and image.
Orupabo’s practice draws on a wide range of visual sources, including colonial archives, vintage pornography, cartoons, retro horror films and imagery found in obscure corners of the internet. She cuts, manipulates and recombines fragments from these sources into new compositions that address race, identity, gender, class and the politics of representation.
Black women frequently occupy the center of her works. Historically photographed, classified and observed through the gaze of others, these figures are repositioned by Orupabo as active presences. Rather than remaining passive objects of looking, they appear to confront the viewer and return the gaze.
The exhibition’s title reflects this tension between intimacy and perspective. Moving too close to a fragment of an image, a person or a story can make it harder to understand the whole, while distance can obscure the complexity of individual experience.
“Frida Orupabo’s works are aesthetically compelling, physically present, and intensely confrontational all at once,” said Caroline Nymark Zachariassen, Chief Curator at Kunsten. “They express an underlying anger and a necessity to speak about the things we either consciously or unconsciously avoid because they can feel too uncomfortable.”
According to Zachariassen, Orupabo’s work confronts histories of colonialism as well as the representation of marginalized groups, particularly Black women. Within the exhibition, the figures appear “as active individuals with agency and strength, looking back at us and resisting,” while making viewers increasingly aware of their own position.
Orupabo has similarly emphasized the importance of that encounter.
“I hope visitors come close to the works while also becoming aware of their own position,” the artist said. “The closer you get, the harder it becomes to maintain a distance. You are not simply looking at something—you become part of the encounter yourself.”
The artist’s engagement with found imagery is closely tied to her own childhood. Born in 1986, Orupabo grew up in Norway as the daughter of a Norwegian mother and a Nigerian father. In an environment where few people looked like her or her sister, she found relatively few images in which she could recognize herself.
That absence later developed into an intensive search for imagery connected to her identity. The internet offered access to an almost unlimited visual archive, and Orupabo began collecting, cutting and recombining images to create new narratives and imagined realities.
Her career developed outside traditional art-school structures. Trained as a sociologist and self-taught as an artist, Orupabo began sharing digital collages in 2013 through her Instagram account @nemiepepa, which functioned as both a visual archive and a kind of digital diary.
A major turning point came in 2017, when American artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa discovered her work and invited her to participate in an exhibition at Serpentine Galleries in London. Since then, her collages have moved from screens into physical exhibition spaces, taking the form of life-size figures, sculpture, video and installations.
Orupabo has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Bienal de So Paulo, Gwangju Biennale, Bonniers Konsthall, Astrup Fearnley Museet and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2025, she received the SPECTRUM International Prize for Photography for her photographic and collage-based practice.
Her work is held in collections including Moderna Museet, Museum Ludwig, the National Museum in Oslo, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg.
The Kunsten exhibition also includes Sickbed II and Picnic, both from 2024 and part of the museum’s own collection following a donation from the New Carlsberg Foundation.
A new catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with texts by curator Helen Molesworth and Caroline Nymark Zachariassen, as well as a conversation between Orupabo and Danish author Nana Fatou. Designed by Claus Due, the publication focuses largely on new works created for the exhibition.
Get close enough and you can’t see is on view at Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg from October 8, 2026 through May 9, 2027.
