An Interview: Lines of Resistance: Marcia Kure at the Venice Biennale
Marcia Kure is one of the most compelling artists working today, and Network V, her contribution to the 61st Venice Biennale, shows exactly why. The work asks a question that sounds simple but opens into something much larger: what is a drawn line, really? Not just a mark on paper, but a form of inscription that connects the body to history, to trade, to power. Kure brings together two African graphic traditions, Nsibidi and Uli, with materials that carry their own layered pasts: indigo, kola nut, charcoal, synthetic hair, gold. Each of these substances has traveled, been bought and sold, been used to mark bodies and territories, been caught up in systems far larger than any single hand or gesture. Network V traces those systems not by illustrating them but by working through the same logic that drives them, the logic of the mark, the route, the residue left behind. This essay follows that argument through the work, asking what it means for drawing to function not as a window onto the world but as part of the world's own infrastructure.
Marcia Kure at the 61st La Biennale d'Arte di Venezia: In Minor Keys, Curated by Koyo Kouoh
Marcia Kure presents Network V at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale d'Arte di Venezia, In Minor Keys, curated by Koyo Kouoh. Developed between her studios in Nigeria and the United States, the work moves between large-scale drawing and sculpture, tracing how bodies, landscapes, and histories are shaped by violence, capital, memory, and exchange.
Working with indigo, charcoal, gold, and kola nut, Kure builds atmospheric surfaces through layered glazes, erasure, and unconventional mark-making. Her drawn lines move between African systems of inscription: Nsibidi, Adinkra, Uli, Bamum, Ge'ez, and the marks of contemporary logistics: warehouse floor tape, flight patterns, trade routes, cable lines. The mark is never stable. A trade route becomes a glyph. A scar and a cable line collapse into one another.
The Roadkill sculptures extend these concerns into space, occupying the threshold between the organic and the manufactured, the sacred and the expendable. Network V begins from a single premise: no one stands outside this network. To enter the installation is to become ensnared, another body caught in the web, another presence registered, another mark.
Network V is on view at the 61st La Biennale d'Arte di Venezia, In Minor Keys, curated by Koyo Kouoh, May 9 – November 22, 2026.
Drawing and Writing: The Threshold
Drawing and writing are often treated as separate acts: one visual, the other linguistic. But both emerge through the same encounter between gesture, material, and surface. This studio note reflects on inscription, bodily marking systems, cloth, and material process to consider how traces become organized into legibility across skin, paper, and land.
NETWORK Menil Wall Drawing Commission (2021)
NETWORK repositions drawing as a system of inscription in which materials carry histories of extraction, trade, and circulation. Through movement, fragmentation, and contact, the work unfolds as a spatial field where meaning emerges in passage rather than resolution.
Line; After
Line; After engages drawing as a system of inscription rather than a formal line, tracing how movement, trade, and capital shape bodies, borders, and territory. Through reflections on merchant capitalism, infrastructure, and networks of circulation, Marcia Kure examines how power operates through the movement of goods and people, revealing the entanglement of drawing, labor, and global systems.
Pigment, Extraction, and the Weight of Material
Pigment Extraction and the Weight of Material examines how color begins in soil, bark, seed, and mineral. Reflecting on extraction, labor, and trade, Marcia Kure considers pigment as network, not merely surface, where each mark carries the weight of geology, history, and power. Drawing emerges as inscription shaped by material origin and circulation.
Pushing paper: contemporary drawing from 1970 to now Marcia Kure on Drawing
Marcia Kure discusses drawing and her practice in the British Museum’s touring exhibition Pushing Paper: Contemporary Drawing from 1970 to Now. The exhibition was generously supported by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation and was on view at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, from 19 September to 29 November 2020. The Glynn Vivian Art Gallery is part of the City of Swansea and is supported by the Arts Council of Wales.
What Dot saw on a Walk
A straight line falls in love with a dot. A squiggle promises freedom. Revisiting The Dot and the Line alongside Paul Klee’s claim that “a line is a dot that went for a walk,” this note reflects on discipline, structure, and the politics of form. Where did the dot go, and what does that journey reveal about contemporary drawing?
Thinking about Under Skin, 2019
Under Skin unfolded across the checkered floor of the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, where the grid became both stage and system, a field of lines mapping order, strategy, and control. Bull-shaped figures referencing Bamana boli objects gathered as a coalition within this architectural diagram, invoking biopower, collective force, and the slippage between agency and orchestration. Extending into scarred paper bodies and archival collages, the installation examined how power inscribes itself onto skin, space, and social form.