Trigger

Resistant Faces, a group exhibition I curated in 2021 at Pinakothek der Moderne, addressed these urgent questions by introducing eight different artists working on the body and the archive in the digital age.^{Exhibition details can be found at https://www.pinakothek.de/en/resistantfaces.} One of the main observations that motivated my research was the following antagonism: while the tech world celebrates new digital image technologies as ground-breaking and ‘neutral’, contemporary artists remain suspicious of the latest technological developments, especially when it comes to the claim such technologies make to objectivity and truth. The smartphone has made the shooting, accumulation, and distribution of photographs in social networks simpler than ever before. Many young artists today use the possibilities of platforms such as Instagram, the ‘mega-archive’ of digitized images, as a space that has the potential to produce new, real, and meaningful interactions and relations. By offering oppositional orders of dispersive image material, or by inventing new logics that allow them to structure the heterogeneous image material differently, they find ways to subvert traditional archival logics. For them, the point is not a nostalgic return to the safe refuge of the museum – which is impossible as it is – but to keep the discussion about the archive of the future in motion by working on alternative models to it.^{Jenst Schröter, ‘Archive—Post/photographic’, Media Art Net, July 1, 2021, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/photo_byte/archive_post_photographic/scroll/.} My essay focuses on the particular relationship between the Black body and the archive by considering the work of Frida Orupabo, one of the participating artists in the Resistant Faces exhibition, who engages with the history of photography and its shifting role in the digital age.

Born in 1986 in Norway to a Norwegian mother and a Nigerian father, Orupabo uses reconfigurations of virtual, historical, and personal image material to explore questions of race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity. An important strategy in her work is the use of digitally archived images that she finds, transfers, and stores on her Instagram account (@nemiepeba). Founded in 2013, Orupabo’s ‘personal’ archive today consists of more than 2,700 photographic images, as well as excerpts from high- and low-culture videos, films, and texts from all different time periods. It provides unsettling insight into the racist bias that has prevailed in looking at the Black body since the invention of photography.

In a conversation I had with Orupabo for a documentary film produced for Resistant Faces, she noted that all her paper collages are based on digital sketches – on files from which the final, ‘physical’ collages are made. According to Orupabo, she invented this digital archive as it allows her to ‘play around and create new narratives by putting images side by side that are usually not meant to be together’. Short, uploaded videos are especially intriguing to her, as they have to meet the time constraints of the platform.^{Unpublished interview: Frida Orupabo, in discussion with the author, 3 March 2021. The documentary film can be found online at https://www.pinakothek.de/en/resistantfaces.} The fragmented scenes of the found footage create a specific intensity that has its own rhythm and narrative logic. Some of these video clips are shown in exhibition contexts next to her paper works. At the Venice Biennale 2019, for example, nine different screens presented various sequences of uploaded image material from Instagram. By making the viewers unsure of the images’ time and reference point, Orupabo challenges traditional concepts of the archive, which is mainly used as a Western system of power and control.

While artists from the 2000s working with colonial image material, such as Fiona Tan or Tacita Dean, who were famously discussed by Hal Forster in his essay ‘Archival Impulse’,^{Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October 110 (Autumn 2004): 3–22.} focused on non-digital aesthetics and ‘tactile face-to-face experiences’ in the museum space, a new generation of internet artists is including the digital sphere as their predominant ‘exhibition space’ and source of inspiration. These artists show how digital technologies impact our ideas of gender and ethnicity and often stage the body as ‘glitch’ in the sense of the writer Legacy Russell, who argues for a ‘strategic occupation’ of online platforms.^{Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London/New York: Verso, 2020).} Russell states,

Through the application of the glitch, we ghost on the gendered body and accelerate toward its end…. We want a new framework and for this framework, we want new skin. The digital world provides a potential space where this can play out. Through the digital, we make new worlds and dare to modify our own.^{Ibid., 25.}

Digital photography has long been more than a print on a wall – it has conquered virtual space, becoming dispositive and a complex plot at the same time. By playing with visual material, photographed object/subject, and attribution, Orupabo points to the constructedness of documentary images of the Black body, and transfers them from the virtual mega-archive of the internet to the museum space and back, where they become tangible reality. Deploying the internet and the vernacular of the digital as creative material, she critiques the ‘institution’ of the internet as a discourse intersectional with visual culture and art history. Her work decodes the racist history of photography and operates beyond standard visual codes, exposing and simultaneously undermining their enthralling mechanisms.