Jimmie Durham - Italo Calvino

Jimmie Durham (b. 1940) is an internationally acclaimed artist, writer and poet of Cherokee descent. His intricate sculptures and installations mimic the attributes of human beings and animals, and the ways they make or are made into history. Durham collages discarded objects and fragments of organic matter, transforming them with dazzling colour into startling, anthropomorphic configurations. His ersatz ethnographic displays deliver ironic assaults on the colonizing procedures of Western culture. An activist in the American Indian movement during the 1970s, he has also published poetry, fiction and critical theory. Featured at Documenta 9 (1992), his work has also been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

The Survey by British film and art critic Laura Mulvey, author of 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' and other influential essays, explores themes of history and language, space and time in Durham's work. Belgian curator Dirk Snauwaert talks with the artist about his multi-faceted practice. In the Focus, Mark Alice Durant, US performance artist and writer, analyses Durham's diary of Shakespeare's Caliban. For Artist's Choice, Durham has selected texts by Italo Calvino about the loss of speach and the poetry of the invisible. Artist's Writings include essays, poems and a screenplay published here for the first time.