Thinking about Under Skin, 2019

Written By MARCIA KURE

Feburary 6th 2026

Under Skin came together at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm at the very end of my time there, with the careful support of curator Sara Rossling and Oliver Krug, Head of Communications. The checkered floor grid of the exhibition hall was not incidental; it became a visual and conceptual armature for the work, immediately evoking systems of order, strategy, and control.

The grid carried multiple references at once chess, of course, but also fashion, spectacle, and performance particularly Alexander McQueen’s It’s Only a Game (2005), where models begin with apparent autonomy only to become pawns in a choreographed logic they do not control.  The slippage between agency and orchestration.

At the center of Under Skin were bull-shaped figures referencing Bamana boli power objects.

Together, they formed something closer to a system than a set of individual sculptures: a coalition, a multitude. In this sense, the work quietly conversed with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notion of collective force entities that gain power not through singular authority, but through aggregation, relation, and proximity. Standing together on the grid, the figures suggested both resistance and vulnerability: strength in numbers, but also exposure to the rules of the board.

The exhibition was framed by the concept of bio-power, as articulated by Michel Foucault the ways bodies and populations are regulated through systems that promise care, productivity, and optimization while quietly extracting compliance. At the same time, the work asked whether community and shared material intelligence might generate other modes of power other ways of living inside systems without being fully consumed by them.

This question extended into the satellite works. Tie-stained papers were folded, dried, and unraveled into fragile body-forms, their surfaces marked by stains that read as scars. These bodies carried the residue of process as evidence: violence not as spectacle, but as inscription. Nearby, collages assembled from ethnographic archives and fashion imagery collapsed distinctions between science and style, classification and desire. Bodies were fragmented, recomposed, made unstable refusing easy narratives of value or origin.

MARCIA KURE

Marcia Kure lives and works between the United States and Nigeria. She trained at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and is an alumna of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine.

Kure has held solo exhibitions across Nigeria, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Her work has been presented in major international exhibitions and biennials, including La Triennale, Paris (2013); the International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Seville (2006); and the Sharjah International Biennial (2005). In 2014, she participated in the 11th Dak’Art Biennale of Contemporary African Art, Dakar, Senegal. She was also included in Body Talk, a traveling exhibition presented at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; FRAC Lorraine, Metz; and Lunds Konsthall, Sweden. Additional group exhibitions include Not a Single Story at Wanås Konst, Sweden, and NIROX Sculpture Park, Johannesburg (2018–19).

Kure has held academic and research appointments internationally, including Visiting Professor at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm (2019–20); Research Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution (2008); and Visual Artist in Residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2014). She is the recipient of the Uche Okeke Prize for Drawing (1994).

Her work is held in major public collections, including the British Museum, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; The Menil Collection, Houston; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Newark Museum of Art; the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; the Princeton University Art Museum; the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art; the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University; Iwalewahaus, Bayreuth; and FRAC Lorraine, among others.

https://www.marciakure.com/
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