EVENTS
Conversation with Jimmie Durham
22/01/2010
A Conversation with Jimmie Durham
22nd of January. 6.00 P.M
Jimmie Durham (1940, Arkansas, USA. Lives and works in Rome, Italy) is a sculptor, essayist and poet of Cherokee heritage whose life and work has been defined by constant shifts between art, reflexion and politics. From 1973 until 1980 Durham worked as a political organizer with AIM (American Indian Movement) and also served as director of the International Indian Treaty Council and representative to the United Nations. In the early 1980s, following the most combative phase of the Amerindian protests in the USA, Durham returned his attention to art, making a decisive contribution to the emergence of new postcolonial practices and critiques that were to redefine both the geography and vocabulary and indeed the agenda of world art. While his work as a sculptor revolves around strategies associated with various phases in modern and contemporary art (assemblage of waste materials and found objects, a spatial, symbolic and textual intervention in the art space and the production of site-specific projects, actions and documentation in video and photography), a large part of his work poses a radical challenge to conventional representations of “the native” and at once a continual interruption of the Western aesthetic and institutional discursive space. In point of fact, his career as an artist is marked by a twofold exile, namely a detour into organizational militancy and his absence from the territory known as the United States when he moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico from 1987 to 1994. Since the mid 1990s he has lived in various countries in Europe.
Equally engaged with anti-colonialist activist movements and with the uncertainty that art is capable of injecting into the mesh of postcolonial conflicts and powers, Durham frequently appears as a sabotage artist subtly undermining contemporary systems of thinking and culture, a researcher who interrupts the logic of centuries of subjection and power with irony and a clash of cultural values. In his own way, he is a decisive example of the function of the artist as trickster: in other words, somebody who, through enlightening wit, tricks and jokes, makes us more keenly aware of institutionalization. Whether it is revising the mythology of the Caliban and La Malinche, or using stone to contest the civilisation and prestigious objects of the modern world with a kind of philosophy of the mallet, Durham is a channel for a way of thinking and action marked by heterogeneity.
His decisive role as an artist in the geopolitical and cultural transformation of contemporary art, his reputation as a master in the art of creating conceptual decoys and ambushes, is the reason why Durham was invited to move the first piece in this game of Dominó Caníbal [Cannibal Domino].
Jimmie Durham willl participate at PAC 2010, in the proyect Dominó Canibal (Cannibal Domino) curated by Cuauhtémoc Medica. His exhibition, at Sala Verónicas in Murcia, will be open from 25th of January. More information here.
Information and enrolment
Language of the Seminar: English with simultaneous translation into Spanish
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