Collage as Resistance
On the history of collage, and artists Joiri Minaya and Frida Orupabo
Nearly everyone has an archive of some sort, whether it’s a collection of photographs, greeting cards, letters, magazine or newspaper clippings, or even posters. For those of us who take pleasure in collecting stuff (myself included) it’s a way to revisit different memories, gather objects that speak to us, or ones we simply find visually captivting. With a low barrier of entry, collaging, the art of using ephemera to create new images, has been popular for decades, dating back to as early as 200 B.C. with the invention of paper in China.1 Later gaining popularity in the 10th century in Japan, calligraphers would apply glued paper with words onto various surfaces. The popularized version of collages that we now know today started to appear in the early 20th century, by artists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and later Henri Matisse and John Baldessari. This way of art making and incorporating assemblage found its way into the Dada and Surrealism movements, and later influenced the Pop Art movement.
In the contemporary art landscape, there has been an influx of artists repurposing images from digital archives and melding it with historical, colonial imagery, allowing us to re-imagine the subjects in a new context. Dominican-American multi-disciplinary artist, Joiri Minaya achieves this by utilizing commercial imagery, online catalogs, archival photos, and even paintings, repurposing her images through collage, giving new meaning to both the colonial and male gaze. In her body of work, #dominicanwomengooglesearch, she challenges stereotypes of Dominican women by using results from a Google search, fragmenting body parts, collaging them with tropical imagery, and suspending the life-sized pieces in a gallery space.
Minaya plays upon the over-accessibility to pornographic and sexual imagery, and how our biases and sexual preferences play into what the algorithm shows us. Her use of lower resolution images relates back to the fast-paced internet culture, and how quickly images pass through cyberspace and eventually begin to degrade in quality. The figures exist as pixelated phantoms of their original form, blurry gestures of color, slowly straying away from resembling the human body.
In her recent works on paper, Minaya utilizes vintage postcards from the Dominican Republic with tropical backgrounds to make portraits. Here, she relies less on the algorithm and digital decay, instead focusing on the physicality of these images and the external forces that have weathered them.
In Continuum II, she fragments a painting by Canadian artist Francois Beaucourt (shown on the left) formerly titled Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786), and later re-named Portrait of a Haitian Woman. On the right, she sources a photograph from a brochure of Bávaro, a tourist town in the Dominican Republic. The collage of these two images is poignant, reminding us of the anti-Blackness and racism in the Caribbean, as well as how dark-skinned women are treated within these communities. Minaya challenges the expectations of women, specifically Black and Brown, and the parallels between slavery and the tourism industry:
The collage underscores the shared idea of servitude between the two very different contexts that produced these images, and the parallels in the way both women are available to the maker of the image: holding fruits, with a smile… Hyper-sexualization, vulnerability, and exploitation also lurk around women who work in the tourist industry in the Dominican Republic and other places in the Caribbean.2
When thinking about Minaya’s work, one can be faced with the ugly truths of how Black and Brown women are perceived within our culture. Recycling images and using faces and patterns to embody space, she shows how the reclamation of the female form doesn’t have to be done through the physical body. Nigerian-Norwegian artist, Frida Orupabo has a similar practice, working with images from different sources like eBay, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram, to historical and colonial archives. She creates digital collages and prints them out in pieces, putting each cutout together by hand. These life sized collages address everything from issues of race and gender, to her feelings of representation and sexuality. From a young age growing up in Norway, Orupabo understood that she didn’t look like her peers and struggled with a sense of belonging.
Driven by a “hunger” for images of people that looked like her, she began to source different photographs, manipulating fragments of bodies, isolating them from their previous context and rewriting them into a new narrative.3 In her body of work, Things I saw at night, Orupabo is drawn to the gaze, not from the male perspective, but rather one that her subjects command in each image. In many of these images, she isolates white female bodies, replacing their heads with those of different Black women, immediately shifting the mood and intent of the image. When talking about her work, she admitted that her intention was to comment on the violence inflicted upon Black bodies.
The figures that Orupabo presents to us aren't afraid; they exist, against all odds, in a new world that she has created for us. During an interview with AnOther magazine, she addresses this idea of “being watched” within her collages:
There’s something about working with colonial archives which is so objectifying and so violent; by the use of collage, I am trying to break those images up, to create new and more complex ways of seeing and imagining. A reversed gaze is important because, for me, it represents resistance and power. To look back is to refuse objectification.4
Because Orupabo’s collages are black and white, viewers are more inclined to pay attention to light and shadows, as well as the grandeur of each piece. Larger scale works allow us to be more engaged and enter the subject’s environment — one where space and time are suspended, and only form matters. Both she and Minaya achieve a delicate balance in their collages, one that allows them to combat an oppressive gaze and gain back their autonomy within the post-colonial art landscape.
LOVE Minaya! Recommend Alexis Montoya’s collage work, too—she has an exhibition open in New York now.