PROCESS with Marcia Kure | Alexander McQueen Pre-Autumn/Winter 2022

Marcia Kure is a mixed media artist and sculptor based in Princeton, New Jersey, USA, and Abuja and Kaduna, Nigeria. “The body is a communication device. The script, text, and graffiti on the embroidered garment recall Vai (Liberia), Bamun (Cameroon), Nsibidi and Uli script and body painting of southeastern Nigeria. These lines, glyphs, pictographs and scripts, transform and morph into mapping and trading systems that link naturally derived pigments to bodies, migration, labour, trade, and capital. The lines merge century-old trading systems - between Africa, Europe, and America -with modern day ones, collapsing time and space, fusing histories, and systems of power and production that in turn - become body, an abstracted body - a portrait of Queen Amina (1533-1610), the warrior ruler of the Hausa State of Zazzau. The Amina Project includes one large scale drawing ‘Amina’; eighteen sculptures of relics, fragments and artifacts that represent death, carnage and spoils of war in the form of hair fascinators and four small scale drawings of imaginary members of Queen Amina’s court.” A poem for Amina to skin to gorge, gouge paper, tear, scorch, burn incise a script talk, tell me of warrior queens, water drums warfare courtiers, snake oil salesmen erect sentinels and eunuchs thick dome walls of mud and blood draw me those century old trade routes of indigo and spice on caravan back bead pendant of an Agadez cross, loom, glimmer in dark crevices of gold firearms conceal amb