MARCIA KURE: For Southern Kaduna

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 

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."