An Interview: Lines of Resistance: Marcia Kure at the Venice Biennale

Network V:III

One of the main attractions of the ongoing Venice Biennale is the artworks of artists from countries including Africa. Among them, Marcia Kure is particularly noteworthy. Born in Nigeria in 1970, Marcia Kure is known for her mixed-media artworks. Through these, she explores themes such as identity, history, and the lasting effects of colonialism.

Marcia Kure‘s artwork has continually featured references to fashion and textiles, images of veiled women, and frequent attention to gender and political topics. Early research by Kure concentrated on women’s agency in patriarchal culture and political violence. Her series History of Africa by Fela (2001-2003), consisting of 59 panels on paper executed in pencil, ink, and kolanut pigment, is an illustration of this period. Her latter work explores themes of parenthood, hip-hop aesthetics, haute couture (luxury, custom-made) apparel, and her expatriation experience.

According to the Purdy Hicks Gallery, Kure’s work has strong ties to contemporary uli, an Igbo women’s graphic-intensive art tradition in eastern Nigeria, distinguished by linear patterns and sparse colour use. Additionally, her drawings are described as fusing powerful shapes, symbolic decorative motifs, and sweeping, swirling strokes from many African visual traditions. She frequently uses indigenous African colours, such as coffee and kola nut.

As part of the interview series, a conversation with Venice Biennale artists, Abirpothi, featuring Nigerian-born artist Marcia Kure. The artist discusses in detail her work and her presence in the Venice Biennale.

Q: Can you tell me about your work at this year’s Venice Biennale, which appears to treat drawing not as image-making but as infrastructure: a system of circulation, extraction, and inscription. How does the Biennale presentation extend or transform the concerns you explored in NETWORK and the Networks and Systems works?

Marcia Kure: Drawing and mark-making offered me a way to compress complex, multilayered systems through the line. We live in a time where everything seems to happen simultaneously: information arrives constantly, systems overlap, crises collapse into one another, and I became interested in how the mark could distil that density without simplifying it.

This thinking goes back to my studies at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and my encounter with Uli. What stayed with me was not only the line itself but its relationship to the body, architecture, communication, and inscription. I stayed on the unstable threshold between drawing and writing, and worried about it more. A scar, a trade route, a tally mark, a stitch, a cable line, a glyph: they all began collapsing into one another. The works accumulated through layering, staining, abrasion, erasure, and repetition, so that drawing became less about composing images and more about registering pressure, duration, movement, and relation. Over time, the line stopped functioning as a contour and began functioning as a transmission.

The Biennale presentation extended concerns already present in NETWORK, 2021, and Systems and Network, 2023, but on a larger, more spatial scale. In Venice, the drawings and sculptures operate together as an interdependent field. The sculptures and canvases – the cables, braided hair, ink, pigment and charcoal marks and notations – extend the line physically into and across architectural space; gravity, suspension, and material weight become part of the drawing. The viewer entering the space becomes part of the system being mapped. Venice intensified this by operating through crossings, routes, water channels, and circulation. The work entered into an already existing network rather than occupying a neutral exhibition space.

Network V:I

Q: The Biennale context inevitably frames national histories, borders, and global circulation. Your recent works seem deeply invested in exactly those structures: trade routes, merchant capitalism, migration, surveillance, and extraction. Did Venice become a particularly charged site for these investigations?

Marcia Kure: I had already been thinking through these issues before the Biennale. Venice became a stage upon which those ideas could intensify and expand. Part of what pushed me toward these investigations was my own experience working part-time as a retail sales associate and later in Amazon fulfilment centres. Inside the warehouse, everything was tracked, timed, monitored, and optimised. You are tethered to machines and screens while simultaneously moving through immense systems of circulation. Labour itself becomes logistical. I became fascinated by the choreography of those spaces: the hazard tape directing workers across the floor, the marks left behind by pallet jacks, the scanners, the endless movement of goods. Even the inscriptions on packages from China became meaningful to me. The warehouse floor itself became a mapped surface: routes organised bodies in motion, scanners translated movement into data, and marks on the ground controlled circulation. I began to see contemporary logistics as a form of inscription operating at architectural and planetary scales.

The Roadkill works emerged directly from this experience. The roadkill was an actual animal I encountered on my way to work, evidence of collision points between ecological systems and human infrastructure, where speed, extraction, and mobility intersect violently with natural life. Having practised in Africa, Europe, and America, I also needed to geolocate myself within these systems and understand my position within global networks of labour, migration, exchange, and visibility. There was something uncomfortable about that, being inside the system I was also trying to map. I am not sure I have fully resolved it. Venice became another node within that network rather than a symbolic backdrop.

Q: The materials in your Biennale work, including indigo, kola nut, charcoal, synthetic hair, gold, and carved wood, carry dense historical itineraries. How do you decide when a material operates symbolically, and when it should instead function as evidence or residue of larger systems?

Marcia Kure: I had already been working with kola nut and natural pigments since my Nsukka days, partly through learning from Uli mural artists and indigenous systems of mark-making. Initially, I was interested in the materials both conceptually and formally; even simply as colours, they offer enormous richness, subtlety, and depth. There is something powerful to me about the tonal relationships between indigo, charcoal, red oxide, kola nut, and gold.

But over time, I became less interested in materials as symbols and more interested in them as carriers of historical and material memory. Indigo is already embedded within histories of cultivation, trade, and forced labour before it reaches the surface. Charcoal carries combustion and energy. Gold carries extraction and imperial accumulation. Kola nut carries systems of exchange, ceremony, migration, and survival. The materials arrive already marked by the world.

I also became increasingly interested in how materials behave over time: staining, fading, oxidising, dispersing, eroding, absorbing. Nature and time became collaborators within the work. So rather than illustrating history, the materials function as evidence, residue, and active participants within larger systems of circulation and transformation.

Network V:III

Q: You’ve described pigment as “condensed geography.” In Venice, itself historically shaped by mercantile exchange, colonial trade, and maritime circulation, did the city’s own history enter the conceptual framework of the work?

Marcia Kure: The thing about Network V is that wherever it is placed becomes part of the network itself. Venice entered the work because it is already deeply implicated in systems of movement, migration, labour, exchange, tourism, and circulation: a city built through routes and water infrastructure, historically shaped by trade, colonial expansion, and spectacle. The instability of the city itself, the water, tides, sinking foundations, corroding facades, reflections, and continual movement of tourists and boats, also became important to me conceptually. It feels suspended between permanence and erosion. The person standing in front of the work becomes part of the network as well. No one stands outside these systems.

Q: Your recent writing insists that “the line” is not contour but conduit: something infrastructural, almost logistical. Was the Venice project conceived as an extension of your long-term engagement with line, or did the scale and architecture of the Biennale push you toward a new understanding of drawing?

Marcia Kure: It was both. The project emerged from a long engagement with line, but Venice pushed me toward a more spatial and infrastructural understanding of drawing.

What Uli gave me was not simply a formal understanding of line but an understanding that marks can operate simultaneously as communication, embodiment, architecture, memory, and spatial organisation. Over time, I became increasingly interested in the point at which line becomes inscription, where scarification, glyphs, routes, codes, and notation systems operate through marks that both communicate and transform surfaces. I also became interested in how lines operate beyond aesthetics in the contemporary world: fibre-optic cables, trade routes, migration paths, shipping lanes, circuitry, surveillance systems, scars. The line became infrastructural.

Venice expanded this because the architecture forced me to think beyond the surface. The suspended sculptures extended the line into space. Gravity, tension, and material weight became part of the drawing. The work became more about constructing systems of relation within space.

Q: The Hair Jackets and braided synthetic-hair assemblages introduce questions of gendered labour, beauty economies, and petrochemical production. How do these sculptural works converse with your large-scale drawings?

Marcia Kure: I see them as part of the same system of thinking. Synthetic hair exists at the intersection of the body, beauty, labour, fantasy, petrochemical production, and global commerce: intimate and industrial simultaneously. The braided forms extend concerns already present in the drawings: hair behaves almost like drawing in space, carrying movement, rhythm, pressure, extension, and duration. Braiding is also a form of accumulated labour and embodied knowledge passed through generations of women, while simultaneously existing within global petrochemical industries and transnational systems of manufacture. That tension between intimacy and industrial production is exactly what interests me.

Q: Your work often refuses stable categories: drawing becomes sculpture, surface becomes structure, mark becomes incision. Is this instability important politically for you, especially in relation to postcolonial identity and systems of classification?

Marcia Kure: I find tension productive. I think I resist categorisation partly because I have spent my career existing at the edges of categories: between African and European contexts, between drawing and sculpture, between the academy and the warehouse floor. That position is uncomfortable, but it is also clarifying. You see the boundaries from the outside.

Colonial systems depended heavily upon categorisation, classification, legibility, and control; contemporary surveillance systems operate similarly. A mark can simultaneously function as writing, scarification, mapping, code, drawing, or wound. I do not want those meanings fixed into singular interpretations. Resisting stable categories can also become a way of resisting total visibility and control.

Q: You emerged from the Nsukka School tradition, with its deep engagement with Uli line systems. Your recent work seems to move from lyrical line toward network logic and infrastructural mapping. How do you understand the continuity?

Network V: II

Marcia Kure: My work still begins with the mark, and I doubt I would have arrived at this understanding of line without encountering Uli. What it gave me was not simply a formal language but an understanding that marks can operate simultaneously as communication, embodiment, architecture, memory, and spatial organisation. A scar, a mark, writing, inscription, mapping, and drawing are all connected. The line simply expanded outward into larger systems of relation. I see continuity rather than rupture.

Q: There’s a striking tension in your work between fragmentation and connectivity. The compositions often feel ruptured, unstable, and incomplete, yet they are also held together by dense systems of linkage. Is that tension reflective of how you experience diaspora itself?

Marcia Kure: Yes. Diaspora produces a complicated condition of simultaneity: you exist across multiple geographies, temporalities, systems, and histories at once. There is a connection, but also a rupture. Histories accumulate unevenly across bodies and geographies; some memories remain visible while others erode or become partially inaccessible. The fragments in the work never fully resolve into coherence, but they also never become entirely disconnected. They remain suspended in relation to one another. In many ways, that tension is a portrait of my own existence.

Q: Your collages and photomontages frequently appropriate imagery from ethnographic archives, fashion systems, children’s literature, and colonial image cultures. What interests you about these visual regimes of classification and display?

Marcia Kure: I am interested in how bodies become constructed, categorised, circulated, and consumed through images. Ethnographic archives, colonial photography, fashion systems, and popular image cultures all participate in systems of looking and classification. In my recent work, the body increasingly merges with pigment, inscription, and material; indigo, kola nut, scars, marks, and adornment all become ways the body is written upon and transformed into surface. The archive reveals how visual systems organise knowledge and power, but I am also interested in disrupting those systems through fragmentation, layering, opacity, and recombination.

Q: In works such as Ethnographica and The Three Graces, clothing and adornment appear as extensions of the body, almost like portable architectures of identity. Has your understanding of the body shifted in your more recent work on capital, extraction, and circulation?

Marcia Kure: Yes. Increasingly, I think of the body as infrastructural: something through which systems of labour, migration, trade, surveillance, extraction, and desire move and organise themselves. Clothing, adornment, synthetic hair, scarification, and ornament all become extensions of those systems. The body becomes both surface and site, a place where histories and infrastructures register themselves materially.

I think about my own body in this way too: what it carries visibly and invisibly, what it is read as before I speak. That is not an abstract condition. It shapes what spaces feel available, what kinds of authority are assumed or withheld, and how presence is interpreted. The work is partly an attempt to make those readings visible and to complicate them.

Q: You’ve written about how merchant capitalism transformed bodies and land into exchangeable commodities, and how contemporary surveillance capitalism extends those logics into data and attention. How does drawing allow you to think through these immense systems differently than writing or theory would?

Marcia Kure: When I am working through a problem in the studio, asking how a route becomes a scar or how logistics becomes a form of inscription, I cannot always find the entry point through language. Writing requires me to stabilise an argument before I fully understand it. Drawing lets me stay inside the uncertainty longer. Contradiction, simultaneity, and fragmentation can coexist on the surface without needing to be resolved. A mark can hold migration, circuitry, scarification, trade routes, and extraction at once; I can keep working without deciding which one it is.

That indecision is not a weakness. It is how I find out what I actually think. The body moves through the work before the mind catches up. Drawing allows me to think spatially, materially, emotionally, and relationally at the same time, not as an illustration of theory, but as a way of thinking through systems that exceed language.

Q: Your work often oscillates between beauty and violence. The surfaces are sensuous, materially rich, and seductive, yet they also carry histories of coercion, labour, and displacement. Is aesthetic pleasure something you deliberately complicate in the viewer?

Marcia Kure: Yes. Many of the materials I work with are seductive: indigo, gold, charcoal, hair, rich pigments, intricate surfaces. But embedded within them are histories of labour, extraction, coercion, and violence. I am interested in how surfaces can draw viewers into proximity before those histories begin to emerge more slowly. I do not want the viewer to arrive at a stable relationship to beauty. I want the pleasure to remain complicated and entangled.

Q: You’ve spoken about perception itself being partial: that viewers can only ever grasp fragments of larger systems. Does your work intentionally resist total comprehension as a way of critiquing the modern desire to map, classify, and control everything?

Marcia Kure: Total comprehension is often tied to systems of domination and control; colonial, bureaucratic, and surveillance systems all depend upon visibility, legibility, and the continuous extraction of information. I am interested in opacity, fragmentation, incompleteness, and partial perception. The systems the work engages are themselves too vast and entangled to fully map. Opacity can become a form of resistance.

Q: Across drawing, collage, pigment, and assemblage, your practice continually asks how materials remember histories. At this stage in your career, what do you think drawing can still do politically and emotionally that other mediums cannot?

Marcia Kure: Drawing remains profoundly important to me because it is at once immediate, unstable, intimate, and expansive. It can move between body and infrastructure, between gesture and system, between intimacy and planetary scale with extraordinary fluidity. It can absorb writing, mapping, notation, scarification, architecture, code, and memory while remaining open. Politically, drawing still resists fixed categories. Emotionally, it can register hesitation, exhaustion, repetition, fragility, pressure, care, erosion, and duration in ways that feel deeply human. Even when engaging immense systems of extraction, surveillance, or circulation, drawing still carries the body’s trace. I still believe it allows us to remain inside complexity without needing to fully master or resolve it.

By Krispin JosephPX

Krispin Joseph PX, a poet and journalist, completed an MFA in art history and visual studies at the University of Hyderabad and an MA in sociology and cultural anthropology from the Central European University, Vienna.

Read the interview on Abirpothi's website

Marcia Kure at the 61st La Biennale d'Arte di Venezia: In Minor Keys, Curated by Koyo Kouoh

Installation View: Network V

"In refusing the spectacle of horror, the time has come to listen to the minor keys, to tune in sotto voce to the whispers, to the lower frequencies; to find the oases, the islands, where the dignity of all living beings is safeguarded."

— Koyo Kouoh

The light is low. Deliberately so. Set until the room becomes interior, subdued, suspended. The intention, to feel the room before you enter it. Move toward it, slow down, let your eyes adjust. The drawings reveal themselves under that kind of attention, fragile and aggressive at once, marks that only surface when you are close enough to feel the scale of them.

Two of the sculptures hang suspended. They sway. Not mechanically but from air movement, from the passage of bodies through the space. Your presence animates them. They rotate slowly, foreboding, like armor that breathes. The sound of the room reaches you before the work does, the low hum of conversation, footsteps entering and leaving, the particular quiet that settles when someone stops in front of something and stays. People stood close and asked how they were made. The answer is labor: hair braided by hand, each strand worked into form over hours. That labor is visible in the object.

I watched people move through the installation. They slowed. Some reached toward the work and stopped themselves. Some stood for a long time in front of a single drawing, leaning in, then stepping back. The room was alive in a way I had not anticipated, not from the work alone but from the encounter between the work and the bodies inside it, the sound of them, the weight of them, the way their movement made the sculptures turn. That was the network becoming visible.

Drawing is a minor key. It has always been. Not the grand gesture of painting, not the weight and presence of sculpture. The line. The trace. The mark that persists below the threshold of visibility. To tune in sotto voce, to follow the whisper of charcoal grazing across a surface, to stay with the evasiveness and instability of the drawn line, is to listen to the lower frequencies. To find stillness inside the web we are all entangled in.

The network does not begin or end. It is a continuous loop. No one stands outside it. To enter the installation is to become ensnared, another body caught in the web, in constant relation to the drawings and sculptures that surround you, another presence registered, another mark. Network V does not offer a position of observation. It places you inside its grasp.

Installation View: Network V

A scar, a trade route, a tally mark, a cable line, a glyph. They collapse into one another.

I have always felt unease with fixed and firm definitions. That is probably why my work moves between Nigeria and the United States, between drawing and sculpture. Definitions are useful. You cannot address a problem until you define it. But they are also restrictive, keeping things in place that are already evolving, becoming another. My interest lies in where one definition is already slipping into another. The process of something becoming.

The body in my work is no different. It refuses fixed definition for the same reason. The skin is substrate, but substrate that shifts, absorbs, transforms, carries histories it did not choose and cannot fully shed. To move between inscription systems is to move the framework around drawing itself. Drawing does not only occur on a two-dimensional plane. It occurs in space. It can be made with a pallet jack, the contrail of a plane, a cable laid across an ocean floor. The mark is wherever a body moves through a system.

These bodies carry the imprint of displacement, extraction, and transformation. They are shaped by what touches them: language, ecology, labor, and systems of power. My lines track encounters, accumulated pressures, forms of ongoing negotiation. Always negotiation. Nothing is ever settled.

What the body carries visibly and invisibly, what it refuses to release.

The materials I work with carry their own histories into the work. Indigo, charcoal, gold, kola nut. Chosen for what they have moved through. On the canvas their interaction is constant, each surface a field of tensions: the deep blue-black weight of indigo pressing against the volatility of gold, charcoal residue settling into erasure, a shade of kola nut pigment bleeding its own particular brown into the ground. The surface is never stable. It shifts as the materials move against and through each other, building an atmosphere rather than an image. Not all of what accumulates there can be read. Some marks may be legible, some may not. That is intentional.

Indigo and kola nut are central to this work. Their shades carry the labor of colonial trade routes, networks of hospitality, exchange, and social relation, each arriving with its own particular weight and history, each shade sitting differently inside the same web. Charcoal speaks to combustion, clearing, residue, and renewal. Gold carries extraction, imperial plunder, systems of value, and like all of these materials it does not sit still in time. Its value shifts with wars, tariffs, energy routes, the circulation of bodies and goods across contested territories. The television was on. The price of gold that day was transcribed directly onto the surface. News of conflict in the Strait of Hormuz entered the drawing as the shippers arrived to take the work to Venice. The same information moving through the market, the news, the canvas, the shipping container. The mark on the surface and the mark on the world were the same mark.

These materials arrive in the work already charged, carrying residues of movement, migration, contact, and time. They activate the image rather than support it, holding within a single gesture fragments of the world long enough for meaning to perhaps surface, but surely to disperse again.

The work moves through materials, each arriving already shaped by the hands that cultivated, extracted, traded, and carried it. Nothing is neutral. Everything marked by the lives that passed through it.

Network V:I

Nsibidi, Adinkra, Uli, Bamum, Ge'ez. A portion of a glyph is taken, combined with a code, transformed into a migratory route. The lines move between these systems and the marks of contemporary logistics: warehouse floor tape, pallet jack tracks, flight patterns, trade routes, cable lines. A trade route becomes a glyph. A scar and a cable line collapse into one another. The mark is never stable. This is the edge I keep returning to, between writing and drawing, between the pictograph and the flight path, where meaning is not fixed but accumulating, where one system of inscription translates into another without fully resolving into either.

To trade routes, shipping lanes, cables laid across ocean floors, trajectories drawn across the sky. The personal and the planetary held within the same mark.

Network V:VI

The canvas surface is built through light glazes, marks layered over one another, unconventional materials used to score, break, and erase. The process is additive and subtractive at once, traces built upon, erased, built upon again. I know instinctively when a drawing is done. It is when I push it yet it refuses to accept any more marks, as if one more stroke would disrupt the current conversation and begin another one. When I have slightly exceeded its limits. When it starts to spill over. I stop.

This did not begin with Venice. It was already underway, shaped in part by my own experience working in logistics warehouses and fulfillment centers. Inside those spaces everything is tracked, timed, monitored, and optimized. Labor becomes logistical. Workers tethered to machines and screens, moving through immense systems of circulation. What struck me was the choreography: hazard tape directing bodies across the floor, marks left by pallet jacks, scanners translating movement into data, inscriptions on packages arriving from across the world. The warehouse floor was itself a scored surface. Routes organized bodies in motion. I began to understand contemporary logistics as a form of inscription operating at architectural and planetary scales, continuous with the trade routes, shipping lanes, and cable lines that run through the drawings. The warehouse and the drawing were the same thought.

Network V: Roadkill II

The Roadkill sculptures came out of that same period. On my way to work I encountered animals suspended at the threshold after impact, caught between the living and the dead, between natural life and industrial infrastructure, between the sacred and the expendable. The sculptures hold that suspension. Composed of synthetic hair, they occupy a space between the organic and the manufactured, hybrid beings formed not in aftermath but in the moment of collision itself. I was moving through these systems, tethered and tracked, trying to understand my own position within global networks of labor, migration, exchange, and visibility. Having practiced in Africa, Europe, and America, there is something uncomfortable about being inside the system you are also trying to trace. I am not sure I have fully resolved it.

The work holds what cannot be fully read. Resistance living quietly inside what remains unseen.

Drawing, Writing, and Trace

MARCIA KURE, Reticulation, 2022. Collection High Museum of Art, Atlanta

While unbinding sheets of paper that had been compressed and repeatedly immersed in indigo, I noticed that the deepest concentrations of pigment appeared in areas the hand had barely touched. Pressure, moisture, and the fibers' tension had already organized the surface before drawing, in the conventional sense, began. The paper was carrying a record of contact prior to intention.

I keep returning to this condition because it unsettles the distinction between drawing and writing in ways that feel increasingly difficult to stabilize.

The separation between them often appears self-evident. Drawing belongs to the visual. Writing belongs to language. Yet both begin in the same place: a body moving across a surface, leaving a trace through contact. The trace itself does not announce whether it belongs to image or script. That distinction is assigned later, through systems that organize how marks are read.

Taabwa Woman, Democratic Republic of Congo

Photographer unknown, courtesy of Allen F. Roberts and the Central Archives of the White Fathers (Missionaries of Our Lady of Africa), Rome. Pitts Rivers Museum Virtual Collection

This becomes visible in early inscription systems. Proto-cuneiform emerged from pictographic and numerical signs used for accounting before developing more abstract and phonetic forms. Egyptian hieroglyphs hold image, sound, and semantic function together simultaneously. Some Chinese characters retain visible connections to earlier pictographic forms even as the script developed increasingly complex semantic-phonetic structures. Nsibidi moves across pictographic, ideographic, performative, and social registers without conforming fully to either image or writing. These systems do not collapse drawing and writing into the same thing, but they do suggest that the boundary between them is historically produced rather than fixed.

What interests me is not simply the history of these systems, but the conditions that make traces legible in the first place.

In the studio, a trace rarely arrives under stable conditions. Pigment disperses unevenly. Fibers absorb and reopen. Pressure shifts. Surfaces resist. Marks accumulate through contact between materials whose behavior cannot be fully predicted or repeated. The trace forms before its meaning stabilizes. Drawing and writing diverge later, through the structures that organize traces into legibility.

This is partly why I have become increasingly interested in inscription as a condition rather than as a category. Here, I do not mean inscription as a term for all marks. The distinction matters. Inscription begins when traces are organized within systems of legibility, memory, and relation. What falls outside that structure is something prior: the unrecruited mark, the trace that has not yet been gathered into meaning.

While thinking through this, I kept returning to bodily systems of marking. In Uli, gesture and surface operate together as a social and visual system. Meaning emerges relationally rather than through isolated marks. The body does not simply receive inscription; its social meaning is reorganized through it. Among the Luba and Taabwa communities, scarification and hairstyling similarly accumulate over time, registering shifts in memory, relation, and status. What these systems make visible is that inscription is never fully complete. Surfaces remain open to reorganization, addition, and encounter.

I began noticing a similar logic while looking at cloth.

Ndop, Bamum, Bamileke artist, 20th century, Hand-woven, indigo, cotton. Collection North Carolina Museum of Art

Ndop and Adire both organize meaning through structured variation across the surface. Units are repeated, altered, and repositioned. Meaning does not reside in a single motif but in the relation between motifs across the field. I began thinking about this again while looking closely at Look 36 from Alexander McQueen’s pre-autumn/winter 2022 womenswear collection. The marks across the garment are not readable as static symbols placed onto fabric. Their legibility depends on the body inhabiting the garment. Seams, folds, tension, posture, and movement continuously reorganize the surface. The garment cannot be read flat. The inscriptive field shifts as the body moves beneath it.

Look 36 Alexander McQueen PROCESS pre-autumn/winter 2022 women’s wear collection

I am less interested in claiming continuity between these systems than in understanding a shared operation: the organization of traces across surfaces whose meaning emerges relationally rather than independently.

This question became materially unavoidable while working on Network at the Menil Drawing Institute.

The substrate was saturated, repeatedly splashed, and glazed in pigment before any intentional mark entered the surface. Pigment accumulated unevenly across wood and fiber depending on exposure, resistance, and pressure. What became clear through the process was that the surface was already carrying inscriptions before drawing, in the conventional sense, had begun. The material had already recorded immersion, seepage, compression, and duration.

The gouge marks entered that field afterward.

They did not write onto emptiness. They cut through an existing accumulation of traces.

The gouge enacted force differently from the drawn line. Gouged marks severed, opened, and exposed. Drawn lines mapped movement without the irreversibility of the cut. The surface held both operations simultaneously without resolving them into a single system.

The same was true of the pigments. Indigo and kola nut did not function as symbolic references to trade or exchange. Their material behavior already carried those histories within them: cultivation, circulation, extraction, labor, movement across routes and infrastructures. The drawing did not illustrate those conditions from a distance. It was produced through them.

What remains after the hand withdraws is not simply expression. The surface continues to reorganize itself through absorption, residue, pressure, and accumulation. Pigment settles into fibers unevenly. Compression leaves densities that subsequent marks cannot fully erase. Meaning persists not as resolution but as residue.

NETWORK Menil Wall Drawing Commission (2021)

Marcia Kure, NETWORK 2021, Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, Texas © Photographs: Paul Hester

In 2021, I was commissioned to create a site-specific wall drawing for the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston. The installation spanned thirty-six feet across a threshold wall, unfolding through a layered field of materials: charcoal, indigo and kola nut pigments, tea, acrylic, biochar, digital print, synthetic hair, and two carved figures. It operated as a material, historical, and conceptual system whose full force required the viewer's movement through space.

The line in NETWORK is not contour but conduit, carrying histories, materials, and forces that precede the mark. Drawn with materials that were moved, traded, and extracted across imperial systems, each mark arrives weighted by histories anterior to the gesture itself. Indigo is not applied as symbol or metaphor; it arrives as archive: plant chemistry, forced cultivation, the reorganization of bodies and land in service of a color. The routes are already in the pigment. The mark inherits them.

Materials were selected not for legibility but for their actual itineraries: kola nut as stimulant and sacred offering; tea as colonial cultivation compressed into leaf; synthetic hair as a mass-produced commodity embedded within Black diasporic beauty economies and protective practices. Each material performs its own labor, carries its own route, and coexists within the same field without resolving into the others, their proximity generating pressure rather than synthesis.

This system extends beyond the visual. The work resists apprehension from any fixed position; one moves along its edge, encountering fragments: pigment, braid, object, glimpsed in passing and only partially retained. It asks the viewer to walk, trace, and provisionally assemble. Its spatial condition is one of implication rather than disclosure. You do not simply stand before it; you enter it. The wall is not merely a surface but a seam, a threshold that converts viewing into passage. To move through the space is already to be inside the system.

Pigment marks, hair stretches, wood bears. The viewer turns a corner, and the system shifts. Meaning is not deposited in advance; it emerges through encounter, through the viewer's passage across a field that is always only partially present to itself. There is no center from which this movement can be organized. The line does not begin or end; it branches, folds, disappears, and resumes elsewhere. Structure unfolds laterally. The sculptural figures extend this logic into space, forming provisional links across materials, time, and bodies. Some lines terminate; others diverge without conclusion. The wall holds these ruptures without reconciling them.

The two carved figures were purchased in markets and altered. Synthetic hair was braided into them as covering and binding, rendering each object estranged from itself and extending its circulation into new registers. These figures had already moved through economies of production, exchange, and handling before entering the installation. The alteration does not conclude that movement; it reanimates it, connecting the figures to the networked logic of the work and to the bodies of viewers who pass close enough to register the detail.

Gouge marks cut into the wall shift the work from surface to structure. They register pressure rather than depiction, marking sites where force has been applied, resisted, and absorbed. These incisions interrupt the continuity of the field, refusing the neutrality of the wall and exposing it as a material under stress. Drawing here is not only additive but subtractive, not only trace but incision. The gouge marks hold the memory of contact, where gesture becomes impact and surface becomes record.

The work draws on the visual grammar of cartography but does not resolve into a map. Lines suggest movement without fixed direction, connection without coordinates. Routes and flows are invoked only to be disrupted. What emerges is a fragmented cartography, partial and unstable, resistant to the totalizing view that mapping promises. It is what remains when mapping fails, when tracing becomes a record of rupture rather than an instrument of control. The work holds together through contact rather than order.

The viewer does not stand outside that contact. Movement activates the work: pausing, misreading, returning. Perception becomes participation, and participation is always partial, a fragment of a whole that cannot be fully held. What is missed on one pass may surface on another. To move through it is to read without arriving. The work does not conclude; it continues to move through those who have moved through it.

Line; After

©Marcia Kure, Network V (Detail) 2026. Large-scale drawing from Network V with a richly layered surface built from charcoal, acrylic, graphite, and subtle traces of gold. Dense, intersecting lines spread across the composition, forming a network of routes, crossings, and clustered marks that suggest movement, circulation, and infrastructure. Areas of deep indigo saturation contrast with lighter, abraded passages, creating a sense of accumulation and erosion over time. The marks produce a dynamic field of connections, evoking glyphs, trade routes, data flows, and systems of exchange. The surface appears worked and reworked, holding traces of pressure, repetition, and material history.

Line as network, infrastructure, and inscription

After my return from Sweden, I began to reflect deeply on the experience and reassess the role of the line in my work. I demanded more from it, not just as a formal device but as a conceptual tool. I explored its many manifestations: line as form, couture, gesture, writing, drawing; line in space; line as infrastructure; and line as network. It became a way to articulate systems, bodies, and relations, both visible and invisible.

As I traced the movement of goods, my focus turned to the mechanisms of power that govern circulation: who controls it, who assigns value, who is allowed to cross borders, and who is not. The more I examined these flows, the more evident it became that capital organizes bodies, borders, land, and territory according to its own logic of accumulation.

I began to consider merchant capitalism not as a historical footnote but as a foundational structure. It was an early form of capital that generated profit not through production but through movement: buying cheaply in one place and selling at a premium in another. It operates through extraction, displacement, and removal. It renders land fungible and bodies exchangeable. Merchant capitalism laid the groundwork for contemporary systems of trade, surveillance, and logistical control. These structures continue to shape how we move through the world.

This led me to ask: under what conditions does something become a commodity? What must be displaced, enclosed, or coerced to make circulation possible? What forms of violence sustain the flow of goods? These questions sharpened my interest in the control of land and territory, not simply as geography but as infrastructure for profit. Borders are not just lines on a map; they are instruments of exclusion and inclusion, enforced through power.

In the studio, this inquiry brought renewed focus to the body as both subject and object of these systems, a site through which capital moves, but also one that resists, absorbs, and remembers.

I began to recognize the continuity between systems: how one structure leads into another, how seemingly distinct processes are deeply entangled. At the same time, I confronted the limits of perception. The vastness of these networks makes them impossible to grasp in their entirety. I could only ever see fragments: partial glimpses of an expansive, evolving mesh.

Pigment, Extraction, and the Weight of Material

When I began developing my proposal for the wall drawing installation at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, I returned to a question that continues to structure my practice: Where does a material begin?

It does not begin in the studio or on the wall. It begins in soil, bark, seed, and mineral. It begins in cultivation and labor. It begins within systems of knowledge that precede artistic intention. To ask where a material begins is to ask about geology, agriculture, trade, and the movement of bodies across territory.

Right: A close-up view of two kola nut shells. The shell on the left shows natural post-harvest decay, while the shell on the right remains freshly harvested and intact. Despite the deterioration of the outer husk over time, the inner kola nut remains preserved once the shell is removed, underscoring kola nut durability. Image courtesy of Wellcome Collection. Photography by Yaw Afrim Gyebi, 2025.

Left: Botanical lithograph of Cola acuminata (kola nut plant), 1906, illustrated by Matilda Smith for Curtis’s Botanical Magazine. The composition presents the plant in scientific detail, with elongated leaves, delicate star-shaped flowers, and segmented pods shown both intact and opened to reveal the seeds within.

During my visiting professorship at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2019, I extended my study of kola nut pigment and its extraction, a material I have worked with since my years at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. At the same time, I began thinking more rigorously about naturally derived pigments in general: plants, earth, minerals, and the processes through which they are crushed, soaked, burned, fermented, and ground before binding to a surface. Each stage involves technical knowledge and intervention. Each stage situates pigment within systems of extraction and exchange.

© MARCIA KURE. This video clip captures a lecture by Malla Tallgren on pigments and their material life, presented on Monday, 9 September 2019, at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Challenging the idea that color is immaterial, Tallgren examines pigments as concrete particles derived from distinct material sources, each with its own shape, size, and chemical composition. Tallgren is a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki. The lecture formed part of Pigments from Nature, a course developed by Tallgren and held at Mejan for the first time in collaboration with Kristina Janni Ståhl.

While in Stockholm, I attended a lecture by Malla Tallgren, a specialist in painting materials and methods whose course on natural pigments traces the historical and technical dimensions of color production. The lecture was methodical and materially grounded. What remained with me was a structural insight: every pigment has a lineage. No color is neutral. Each carries the conditions of its making.

This awareness clarified the material and historical weight of working with indigo and kola nut. Indigo cultivation in the Americas relied on agricultural knowledge carried by enslaved West Africans, embedding diasporic expertise within plantation economies. What appears as a luminous blue is inseparable from forced migration, coerced labor, and transatlantic exchange. Kola nut, long central to West African ceremonies and trade networks, entered colonial commodity circuits and later industrial production, shifting from communal exchange to global consumption. Both materials exceed pigment. They bear the marks of displacement, circulation, and transformation.

To use indigo and kola nut in a drawing is not merely a chromatic decision. It situates the work within routes of travel, systems of value, and accumulated histories. Pigment becomes condensed geography, matter carried through hands, territories, and markets before arriving in the studio.

© MARCIA KURE: Sketch for Menil Wall Drawing Commission, 2021

In that installation, the line does not function as contour or boundary. It operates as linkage. It evokes trade routes, fiber optic cables, scars, and migration paths. The line collapses distance and disrupts sequence. It stages simultaneity rather than progression. The drawing becomes a mesh in which fragments intersect and overlap, carrying residues of past systems into present configurations.

The more I examined pigment extraction, the more I understood that materials themselves are networks. Extraction intervenes in land. Processing applies knowledge to matter. Trade circulates value. Use inscribes surface. Each mark therefore contains prior actions. It is never isolated from the systems that produced it.

The work proposes that drawing is a form of infrastructure: a field where matter, memory, and power converge and become legible.

This recognition altered how I approached the wall. A surface is not neutral. It can be scarred, gouged, and stained. It can register pressure and incision. Just as pigment holds histories of labor and trade, substrate holds histories of force. The wall becomes a field where material memory is made visible.

Thinking through merchant capital, in which bodies were bought and sold to generate profit, and surveillance capital, in which data is harvested and monetized, I began to see continuity in extraction logics. Soil is mined. Minerals are mined. Attention is mined. Data is mined. Technologies change, but the structural logic of accumulation persists. Exchange remains central to value production.

Pigment extraction therefore operates in this work not only as subject but as method. To draw with indigo and kola nut is to acknowledge that drawing participates in historical and contemporary circuits of exchange. To stain a wall with these substances is to foreground the entanglement of aesthetics and economy, of beauty and violence.

Material knowledge is inseparable from political knowledge. The way a pigment is sourced, processed, and circulated shapes the conditions under which it appears as art.

Since Stockholm, I have become more deliberate about the weight I place on materials. I do not ask them only to describe form. I ask them to carry memory and to register systems. Networks of Entanglement proposes that drawing is not a neutral act of mark making. It is participation in exchange. It is inscription within layered structures of power, labor, and value. Pigment, granular and seemingly quiet, is never neutral. It arrives already entangled.

Pushing paper: contemporary drawing from 1970 to now Marcia Kure on Drawing

Marcia Kure talks about drawing and her work in the British Museum touring show:

Pushing paper: contemporary drawing from 1970 to now

A British Museum Touring exhibition. Generously supported by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation

19 September - 29 November 2020 - Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea

Glynn Vivian Art Gallery is part of the City of Swansea and supported by the Arts Council of Wales

Transcript from Video for Pushing paper: contemporary drawing from 1970 to now

I am fascinated by the idea of drawing-
To draw, to pull, to tug at something
Since my encounter with Uli script writing and South African cave drawings, I have always sought to push the boundaries of what drawing can be, what does it mean - to draw - Stretching the boundaries of its meaning, expanding the notion and freeing it from the confines of 2 dimensionality. Also, rethinking 2 dimension - what it mean as it relates to drawing?
This - in varied forms have been the quest central to my practice as an artist.

I have pulled needle and thread through fabric, used the cut of scissors as line, stitched with a sewing machine and drawn the spaces in-between line.
Felt and molded clay with my hands to form the contours of a body
And asked the question -

Must line be something you can see?
Can line be a leaf falling from a tree, a walk, can a be a journey. Can it also be the experiences within that journey?
Must drawing be visible to the naked eye?

One thing to always remember about drawing is that it is seminal, it marks the beginning of something and like a stem cell, drawing can become anything.

Drawing places a mark, it records time, space, distance and movement.

About the work in Pushing paper
The drawing in Pushing Paper was conceived as a suite of drawings for the Paris Triennale, Intense Proximity, curated by Okwui Enwezor, in 2012
It is a configuration of Uli scriptwriting from Southeastern Nigeria, the biomorphic shapes of Nok terracotta sculpture and Bamana Boli figures from Mali, Traditional hand-drawn Disney animation, surrealism, and a touch of kawaii

Following its initial presentation, the exhibition toured across the United Kingdom, extending its questions around inscription, power, and collective form into multiple institutional contexts. It was first presented at the British Museum in London (September 12, 2019 – January 12, 2020), before traveling to the Oriental Museum in Durham (February 29 – May 17, 2020). The work later moved to the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea (September 19 – November 29, 2020), then to The Cooper Gallery in Barnsley (December 12, 2020 – March 6, 2021), and most recently to the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness (April 2 – June 4, 2022). Across these sites, the installation encountered new architectures and publics.

What Dot saw on a Walk

The story details a straight blue line who is hopelessly in love with a red dot. The dot, finding the line to be stiff, dull, and conventional, turns her affections toward a wild and unkempt squiggle. Taking advantage of the line's stiffness, the squiggle rubs it in that he is a lot more fun for the dot.

The depressed line's friends try to get him to settle down with a female line, but he refuses. He tries to dream of greatness (seeing himself as a daredevil, a leader in world affairs, a law enforcer, a vital element in the art world, and a sportsman) until he finally understands what the squiggle means and decides to be more unconventional. Willing to do whatever it takes to win the dot's affection, the line manages to bend himself and form angle after angle until he is nothing more than a mess of sides, bends, and angles. After he straightens himself out, he settles down and focuses more responsibly on this new ability, creating shapes so complex that he has to label his sides and angles in order to keep his place.

When competing again, the squiggle claims that the line still has nothing to show to the dot. The line proves his rival wrong and is able to show the dot what she is really worth to him. When she sees this, the dot is overwhelmed by the line's responsibility and unconventionality. She then faces the now nervous squiggle, whom she gives a chance to make his case to win her love.

The squiggle makes an effort to reclaim the dot's heart by trying to copy what the line did, but to no avail. No matter how hard he tries to re-shape himself, the squiggle still remains the same tangled, chaotic mess of lines and curves. He tries to tell the dot a joke, but she has realized the flatness of it, and he's forced to retreat. She realizes how much her relationship with the squiggle had been a mistake. What she thought was freedom and joy was nothing more than sloth, chaos, and anarchy.

Fed up, the dot tells the squiggle how she really feels about him; denouncing him as meaningless, undisciplined, unkempt, unaccountable, insignificant, indeterminant, inadvertent, out of shape, out of order, out of place, and out of luck. She leaves with the line, having accepted that he has much more to offer, and the punning moral is presented: "To the vector belong the spoils." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dot_and_the_Line

Paul Klee:

A line is a dot that went for a walk

Question:

Where did the dot go?

What did the dot see? Who did the dot meet? How did the dot feel on the walk?

#studionotes

The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics

Directed by Chuck Jones

Co-directed by Maurice Noble

Narrated by Robert Morley

Produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film (1965).

Thinking about Under Skin, 2019

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 biopower, 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.

Bamana Boli figure, Mali

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.

PRESS RELEASE

UNDER SKIN

Marcia Kure

12–20 December 2019

Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm

Mixed-media installation by United States-based Nigerian artist Marcia Kure opens on 12 December at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm: Under Skin presents a new chapter in the artist’s ongoing exploration through an investigation into identities and power structures across geography and community

Currently guest professor at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, the artist opens a dialogue around ‘bio-power’, a term coined by French philosopher Michel Foucault in the 1970s, describing authoritarian rule over individuals and entire populations through optimised productivity. Systems of power achieve social subjugation through raised standards of living, welfare and health conditions as well as technological advances in a problematic trade-off for increased collective control. As such the concept of bio-power frames the social sphere and human life as governed by mechanisms that adjust the self as well as the collective for the purpose of control.

Under Skin takes the premise of bio-power, yet poses the question: Can community, in our day, create ideas and practices of power and with them, develop affirmative modes of living and socio-political organization? In contemplating this question, Kure’s starting point is the bull-shaped boli figure – the form and idea of which are central to the exhibition. Produced by Bamana sculptors from West Africa and owned by secret power associations, these enigmatic objects become potent tools for the manipulation of elemental and cosmic powers. Moreover, the accretion of diverse ritual materials, deposited over time by the owners on its surface or skin, invariably signified its accumulation of power and energy.

Kure’s boli figures, made from hair extensions, candle wax, plaster and pigments invoke the form of Bamana power figures yet gesture towards elements of high fashion, mass consumption and entertainment. Thus, though the figures seem playful, massed together, they constitute a coalition of diverse energies – pointing towards Hardt and Negri’s concept of multitude, arrayed against the global, post-ideological and post-national empire – as they stand strong together, on the checkered floor of the Royal Institute’s exhibition hall.

In a nod to Alexander McQueen’s 2005 runway show It’s Only a Game, in which fashion models at first move around freely, showing off the latest from the designer’s haute couture, but eventually are turned into marionette-like pawns on a chessboard lit up on the luminescent floor – until the game reaches a disastrous checkmate – Kure aligns the boli figures in formation, as if ready for a power play with Empire’s immanent forces.

The artist further explores the body as a site of protest in the satellite works that connect to the central stage occupied by the power figures. Here she implicates science as a tool that in the hands of political authorities is deployed to regulate human bodies, control knowledge, and maintain systemic order. What the spectator sees is tie-stained paper, which when dried and unraveled become bodies whose skins show scars of their physical trauma. These marked bodies bear testimony to technologies of bodily violence upon which old and new political hegemony depend.

Under Skin furthermore includes two of Kure’s new collages. Using material from the archives of the Ethnographical Museum in Stockholm, the artist reassembles body parts, objects from ethnographic auction catalogues, and images from fashion magazines to create figures in which the politics and histories of empire and colonial subjection, art and beauty, fashion and prejudice collide – thus suspending ready assumptions about meaning, value and valence of contemporary bio-power.

Marcia Kure studied at the University of Nigeria and is also an alumni of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In addition to exhibitions in Nigeria, Germany, the Netherlands, England and the United States, her work has been exhibited at La Triennale, Paris (2013), International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Seville (2006) and Sharjah International Biennale (2005). Kure is currently a visiting professor at The Royal Institute of Art where she works with the school’s students on the course Pushing Boundaries: New Forms of Sculptures, which seeks to broaden the definition of sculpture.

Royal Institute of Art Stockholm is a leading art institution for higher education and research in Stockholm with a long artistic tradition since the 18th century. It offers both graduate- and postgraduate education in art, and postgraduate education in architecture. The school runs an active international programme with projects, lectures, exhibitions and publications.

Rutiga Golvet (The Checkered Floor) was initiated in 2017 as a meeting space for art theory, publication, exhibitions and seminars, for artists to attend to urgent issues and to develop artistic and educational projects. Rutiga Golvet is a workshop space for thought and discourse where curators, editors, critics and art scholars are invited to interact with the Royal Institute of Art’s educational programmes – capturing, highlighting and deepening artistic and philosophical issues that exist at the school, and putting them in relation to a larger world.

Under Skin, curated by Sara Rossling.