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.