Pink Bunny on our back
Fragments in our bone
Memories in our blood
A tripartite self, us
Mother, father, son
A reconstituted whole
Hair on end, turmoil within
Monument to saints and religion
Home remade
A spectre of the primal
Culture's sutured bodies
Contained, acquiescent
Three bodies, them
Impossible
We are pleased to present Marcia Kure's first London exhibition. The work - made during her recent Residency at the Victoria and Albert Museum - comprises drawing, photomontage and sculpture imagining alternative worlds as a critical response to the postcolonial existential condition.
Marcia Kure (born 1970, Nigeria) lives and works in Princeton, in the United States. Trained at the University of Nigeria, she is an alumna of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Haystack Mountain School. In addition to fourteen one-person exhibitions in Nigeria, Germany, the Netherlands, England and the USA, her work was shown at La Triennial, Paris (2013), International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Seville (2006), and Sharjah International Biennale (2005). A Research fellow of the Smithsonian Institution (2008), Visual Artist in Residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2014) and winner of Uche Okeke Prize for Drawing (1994), Kure’s work is in the collections of the British Museum, the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Newark Museum, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, IWALEWA-Haus, and the Sindika Dokolo Foundation. She will present her work at the 11th Dak’art, Biennale of Dakar, Senegal, in May.
Kure is a prominent member of the University of Nigeria-based Nsukka School known for its combination of lyrical simplicity and socio-political vision. Her recent drawing, photomontage and sculpture imagine alternative worlds as a critical response to the postcolonial existential condition. Through appropriation and reconfiguration of normative fashion aesthetic, classic juvenile literature, African masking forms, and children's toys, she produces hybrid, darkly striking images and objects that insinuate postmodern loss of certainties and postcolonial destabilization and fragmentation of identities. Her work suggests that from our complex encounters with the present might emerge new orders of being that are at once hopeful and despairing, reassuring yet haunting, beautiful and terrifying.