MEXICO CITY — As soon as you enter Frida Orupabo fear of fear at Galerie Nordenhake, the room seems to fall silent, canceling out the raucous sound of traffic outside. The Nigerian-Norwegian artist’s first solo exhibition in Mexico includes videos, wallpapers, sculptures and life-size cut-out collages of young mostly black women pegged to white walls in a large, sparse room surrounded by curtains of green velvet.
The title, taken from a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, reflects Orupabo’s question of what it must be like to live in fear of others and fear of that fear. This pun made me wonder how the average Mexican visitor might perceive this show, given the paucity of black life or culture in a vast country where Afro-Mexicans make up about 2% of the population.
The artist, who grew up in a small town in Norway, addresses the under-representation of black women in the West through collages of nimble-jointed paper figures that evoke a fragmented sense of belonging. His subjects seem distant but they also confront the viewer with a fixed gaze. This is the case of the girl with long, fringed hair, whose bust is supported by stilts, and of the girl whose face is surrounded by a black halo background. They struck me as solitary beings with dismembered or partitioned bodies that could turn into something whole or crumble at any moment, due to the lack of torsos or associated accessories, such as immaculate necklaces and wigs.
The young people I spoke with were quite comfortable with the show, connecting it to race but not to their own cultural background. The gallery staff seemed to understand how this exhibition could address the Afro-Mexican question. Ironically, they said few locals who liked the works made the connection to the largely unrecognized history of Afro-Mexicans in that country.
Seeing this show in a city where anti-black racism doesn’t carry the same weight as in the United States or Europe was heartening. But I also came away feeling that the elephant in the room was the absence of Afro-Mexican individuals among us, while the burden of recall was carried by these surreal black figures.
Frida Orupabo: Fear of Fear continues at Galerie Nordenhake (Monterrey 65, Roma Norte, Cuauhtémoc, Mexico City, Mexico) until June 17. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
