MARCIA KURE: For Southern Kaduna

11 November 2021 - 5 March 2022

MARCIA KURE
For Southern Kaduna | Susan Inglett Gallery
Hybridish, curated by Alistair Hicks, exhibition view, 2020, courtesy Georg Kargl Fine Arts, © Georg Kargl Fine Arts, photo: kunst-dokumentation.com.
In the elemental power of the animal and human figures I see parallels to the savagery of contemporary society. However, the beauty I see in these forms is contrasted to the violence."

–Marcia Kure
MARCIA KURE, FOR SOUTHERN KADUNA I - GRIEF, A MANY FEATHERED THING, 2017-2020

Marcia Kure is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores post-colonial existentialist conceptions and identities. For Southern Kaduna is a four part series named after Kure's home state in north-western Nigeria. Ethnic and religious tensions in the region have recently been brought to a flashpoint by an ever-worsening climate crisis. This diminishing access to land and its use has fractured communities already burdened by post-colonialism. Kure acknowledges these multivalent systems of struggle and purpose in a series of collaged figures assembled from ethnographic auction catalogues, calendars, images torn from fashion magazines, and colonial-era photography.

I came to collage via drawing. When trying to solve a drawing problem, I realized I could cut the shapes around a form or figure, combining them to create new interactions and narratives, dis/unity, tension and friction. Line is activated where the cut and the image meet. For me, the emphasis has always been on line - and the images the cut shapes contain.

- Marcia Kure
MARCIA KURE, For Southern Kaduna III – Stardust, 2017-2020

According to author and human rights lawyer Ayo Sogunro, the Nigerian cultural identity comprises an abundance of varying, and sometimes opposing, cultural norms. It is from this context of ironic and contrastive social philosophies that Marcia Kure's abstracted figures take their shape. Structures and systems of societal constraint manifest as inscribed rectangles from which Kure's subjects emerge or descend. Their spacial occupation is thus never settled, and consequently neither is the viewer's eye. Instead, Kure's work provides an experience of suspended kineticism that charges and activates the relationships between subject, and object, and audience.
The frame of reference for the contemporary artist in Nigeria is much wider and more variegated than what his or her counterparts in Western metropolises will ordinarily enounter. Drawing from a country with a plethora of ethnic groups - about 250 - and a welter of cultural practices, the locale from which artists draw their inspirations is vast. This, to a limited extent, is the environment that inspires Marcia Kure, prompting her to turn her searchlight on weaving and womanhood as metaphors for much deeper social dilemma.

- dele jẹgẹdẹ
MARCIA KURE, For Southern Kaduna II – Were Shadows to be Banished, 2017-2020

The artist's considered choice of source material contributes to the overall messaging of Kure's collage works, as they point to the various participants in globalised systems of representation and subjugation. A 2020 cover of Art Journal, portraying an idyllic, tranquil landscape, plays the foil to a distressed protagonist. Of such relationships, the author states, "This forged, fused, and forced union — the kind of union that yields similar traits and sometimes it yields contradictions. I’m not really interested in the things that have a fixed or defined position or definition. I am more interested in things that are constantly shifting, things that defy categorization, it’s not really a question of what I can use to position or frame my paintings, but more about the places in between, the grey areas if you will, the negative spaces."
MARCIA KURE, For Southern Kaduna IV – A Harvest, 2017-2020

"For Southern Kaduna" is about violence to bodies, land, the natural environment, the feminine, global warming, fragmentation, displacement and forced migration from ancestral lands. It draws on my experiences living and working in Africa, Europe and America.

My aim with drawing is to free it from its two-dimensional constraints and rethink technique, language and concept of drawing. I do not only think of drawing as something you put on paper. Drawing can be immersive, performative and experiential. It could be virtual traces of bodies displaced as a part of a network. Drawing is dragging your feet across sand or snow, the contrails of an airplane, a journey, a walk, a gesturing on paper or in the landscape.

-Marcia Kure
MARCIA KURE, For Southern Kaduna (I-IV), 2020
Copyright Photographer, Patrick Miller and Kungl. Konsthögskolan

Marcia Kure was born in Kano, Nigeria in 1970. She received her BFA in painting from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and is also an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In addition to solo 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’s work is in the permanent collection of the British Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Newark Museum, The Studio Museum, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, IWALEWA-Haus and Frac Lorraine. Coverage of her practice has appeared in such publications as The New York Times, ArtReview, Hyperallergic, Artforum, The New Yorker, and the LA Times. Marcia Kure lives and works between the United States and Nigeria.