Under Skin

About

In UNDER SKIN, Marcia Kure examines the fine mesh of hierarchies and power structures that stretch across the world, shaping our living conditions, penetrating our bodies, under the skin. Such biopolitical systems of relations are dynamic, maintained socially, politically, and economically to control our bodies. Intricately they relate to scientific classifications and groupings applicable to almost any material - which in turn tells a history of the raw material, geographical origin, trade and relation to the human body.

In the exhibited work at Rutiga Golvet, which is part of a longer ongoing investigation of body and identities, the artist manifests and abstracts power as activity and relationship. She gives the immaterial a visual expression, yet a fluid and transient one. In her paper works, the physical force of the hand has left traces of imprinted lines and wrinkled surface – material becomes body and body becomes material. In the portrait-like collages of body parts, cut-out silhouettes and objects from fashion magazines, auction catalogues and the archives of the Ethnographical Museum in Stockholm, the artist gives shape to the deconstructed body; it is simultaneously a projection surface for interpretations of meaning and value. Central to the room, on top of the grid floor, is a group of amorphous sculptures inspired by the power figure boli from Bamana culture. Kure's sculptures are physical experiments made of fabrics, extensions and various layered and unusually combined materials constituting their bodies.

The checkered floor, the grid, which holds the exhibition space together is a structure and idea the artist conceptually incorporates into her exhibition through association with science, order and hierarchy - perhaps as a way to make the intangible more distinct in order to challenge it. With hope in the community, self-organisation, resilience and performativity, UNDER SKIN is a tribute to independent cosmic formations and cultures creating productive power from within.

Sara Rossling

Curator