VENICE BIENNALE 2026 | 9 May - 22 November 2026

The 61st edition of the International Art Exhibition is curated by Koyo Kouoh under the title In Minor Keys. The exhibition will take place through 22 November 2026 at the Giardini, the Arsenale, and venues throughout Venice.

For the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Marcia Kure presents Network V, a new body of work developed between her studios in Nigeria and the United States. In Network V, Kure offers a bold and sustained investigation into the politics of the marked body, the circulation of material, and the layering of time. Her practice moves fluidly between drawing and sculpture, expanding the function of the line beyond its conventional limits to encompass inscription, embodiment, and the residual operations of power. In Kure’s hands, drawing is never a neutral gesture. It becomes a way of tracing how bodies, landscapes, and histories are shaped by violence, capital, and memory—and how they, in turn, respond, interfere, and persist.

The body here is not rendered as a complete figure but examined as a condition. Kure replaces anatomical clarity with fragments, silhouettes, and shifting presences that hover between recognition and abstraction. These bodies bear the imprint of displacement, extraction, commodification, and transformation. They are shaped by what touches them: language, ecology, aesthetics, labor. Kure’s lines do not depict; they map. They track encounters, accumulated trauma, and signal ongoing negotiation.

Network V refers not only to the visual networks inscribed in Kure’s linework, but to the structures - digital, economic, anatomical, and linguistic that govern contemporary life. The “V” remains open in its meaning: it may signal “version,” “vector,” “velocity,” or a fifth iteration in an evolving body of work. What matters is that it points to movement, multiplicity, and refusal of closure. The exhibition resists linear time. It does not begin and end, but folds, loops, and recurs. It invites viewers to dwell in what Christina Sharpe has called “the wake,” a temporal zone where the past continues to press into the present, where loss is active and unresolvable. It draws on Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity, where knowledge is shared without being fully disclosed, and relation matters more than resolution.

In this way, Network V is not a display of work, but a proposition. It asks how bodies marked by history can speak without being reduced. It asks what happens when line becomes memory, when sculpture becomes inscription, and when fragmentation becomes a form of coherence. It offers no easy answers but insists on the urgency of attention: to marks, to materials, and to the worlds they carry.

MARCIA KURE (b. 1970) lives and works between the United States and Nigeria. Her multidisciplinary practice repositions drawing as a system of inscription through which materials are condensed, rerouted, and made to bear weight. She engages synthetic hair, indigo, kola nut, and gold as active agents within systems of circulation and material exchange. Her practice approaches substrate not as passive surface but as infrastructure, a site where histories accumulate and spatial relations are pressurized and reorganized. Across large-scale drawing, sculpture, and installation, Kure extends inscription from surface to structure. Kure’s work is included in the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2026). In addition to solo exhibitions in Nigeria, Germany, the Netherlands, England, and the United States, her work has been presented at La Triennale, Paris (2013); the International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Seville (2006); and the Sharjah Biennial (2005). Kure produced a large-scale work for The Menil Drawing Institute’s Wall Drawing Series in 2021. She participated in the 11th Dak’Art Biennale, Dakar (2014), and was included in the traveling exhibition Body Talk, shown at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; Frac Lorraine, Metz; and Lunds Konsthall, Sweden. She also participated in Not a Single Story at Wanås Konst, Sweden, and NIROX Sculpture Park, Johannesburg (2018–19). Kure served as a Visiting Professor at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm (2019–20). She was a Research Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution (2008), a Visual Artist in Residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2014), and the recipient of the Uche Okeke Prize for Drawing (1994). Her work is held in the permanent collections of the British Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Newark Museum of Art; the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; the Princeton University Art Museum; the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art; the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University; Iwalewahaus, Bayreuth; Frac Lorraine, Metz; and the Menil Collection, Houston, among others.

Photo: Copyright Patrick Miller and Kungl. Konsthögskolan

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VENICE BIENNALE 2026: Marcia Kure | Network V

MARCIA KURE

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