Sunday Review (artists are obsessed with broken bodies, the Guardian art critic is wrong and what I learnt from exhibiting my work with Robert Mapplethorpe)

A slow scroll through the Black imagination

Before we talk art, I would like to highlight these accounts

Novara Media Support independent journalism

Adam Broomberg Palestinian human rights activist

Mark Lamont Hill Author Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics

Lowkey Human Rights activist

Palestine Legal Defending people’s right to speak out

Thank you.

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The art I loved… at Frieze London 2023

Frida Orupago Entangle (2023) / Frieze, Galerie Nordenhake

Arts obsession with the fragmented human form

Frida Orupabo - Galerie Nordenhake

Frida Orupabo is a sociologist and artist living and working in Oslo. Her work consists of digital and physical collages, which explore questions related to race, family relations, gender, sexuality, violence and identity.

Her fractured figures took my mind immediately to Hans Bellmer dolls and I don’t know why. I do know that I feel a discomfort, repulsion even for the forms depicted in Bellmer’s work but a curiosity for Orupago’s. Perhaps the artist’s gender influenced this interpretation? Walking around Frieze I was distracted this interruption to my thoughts, and wondered why I was thinking about these dolls, for the first time in over a decade.

As a young photographer I lived in a housing co-op with other artists - one was a fashion designer whose work was partly influenced by Bellmer’s. There were a lot of photocopies and torn pages of Bellmer’s work around the studio. Back then, this designer’s work seemed provocative, but now it seems just feels uncomfortable when I think about what an asshole he was towards women. The cruel way in which he critiqued women’s bodies. This memory tells me that I am relating Bellmer’s work to this image obsessed, sexist artist that I once knew. My brain is finding it tricky to separate the two. So I feel discomfort when looking at Bellmer’s work. How we process imagery isn’t exactly objective.

It’s interesting how Orupago’s work at Frieze was the catalyst for this examination and I’m still wondering why I connected the work of these two artists. I had no intention of writing about Bellmer when I started writing this post even, but the mind has a way of leading us where we need to go. I’ll get there at some point, but I haven’t yet. All I do know is that examining the intention behind any artist’s work or our reaction to it will not reveal any truths.

More on his work can be found here