Marcia Kure

MARCIA KURE Sarah Adams A t the opening of her 2000 exhibition Cloth as Identity at the Goethe Institute in Lagos, Nigeria, Marcia Kure staged a provocative performance piece that fused a number of themes and concerns that have underpinned her work since 1992. As guests milled about the exhibition space, women dressed in burkas began to trickle into the room and circulate among t h e m . 1 The women approached guests and struck up conversations: "How do you feel when you meet a woman in a hijab?" they asked, drawing people into conversations about commonly held prejudices in Nigeria regarding women who wear the burka.2 After a short period these conversations were interrupted by a steady drumbeat followed by a woman's voice: "What do we think, how do we feel when we see a woman in hijab7 . Beyond everything, the woman in hijab is a wife, sister, mother...She is no less h u m a n than anyone else." As the drumbeat that followed this monologue heightened, the women began to whirl in circles, their burkas fanning out around them so they monopolized more space, forced guests to move out of their way, and slowly asserted nearly complete control over the spatial and social dynamic of the room. Once they commanded all eyes in the room, the performers removed their burkas in a single swift gesture, revealing themselves as trendily dressed young women beneath their robes. In that m o m e n t of revelation, the guests at the exhibition were forced to confront what was perhaps a frustration of their expectations—they were faced with the ordinariness, the humanity, the individuality and the vibrancy of the young women under the burkas. The second part of the performance piece further underscored these ideas: the women returned to the exhibition space in their burkas and danced hip hop style to Afrobeat music by Lagbaja, a popular Nigerian musician who admonished, "No do gra gra for me."^ 8 0 • N k a Journal of Contem porary African Art The performance piece pushed Kure's long-term interest in creating images of veiled women to a new space. She brought her fascination with the veil as an externally observed garment to a personal level by forcefully asserting the individual body in the veil. In that transgressive m o m e n t of revelation Kure stressed women's embodied experiences in the burka: she presented the garment as a potential instrument of power and a choice, not an imposition. I have found a striking resonance between the development of Kure's works on veiled women in Nigeria and the development of my research on theoretical models used to analyze the body and personal adornment. My continued interest in body theory is rooted in my study of Igbo women's body and mural painting in southeastern Nigeria.4 As I surveyed some of the more c o m m o n theoretical frameworks used to interpret personal adornment, I was surprised to find that the early 1 7 t n century French philosopher Rene Descartes, who asserted an absolute dichotomy between mind and body, continues to have a profound impact on all aspects of body theory. Body theory continues to shake out into body or m i n d focused models—the two approaches are not often used in combination.5 I have suggested elsewhere that approaches focused only on the body and its perceived semiotics frame the body as passive, observed, simply receiving culturally derived adornment. In contrast, the application of theoretical approaches focused on embodiment (such as Bourdieu and Connerton), to this same material replaces the mind in the body, frames the body as active, and restores agency to the wearer.6 In embodied models, the body does not just passively receive cultural inscription, it actively creates culture through bodily performances of adornment. I have started to use a combination of these approaches in my work as a way to enrich analysis and collapse the Cartesian mind/body binary I confronted in m y search for useful theoretical models. The trajectory of my research on body theory—moving from external appraisal and analysis to embodiment and...