Jimmie Durham was born in Washington, Arkansas, in 1940. In 1968 he enrolled at L’École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva, where he worked primarily in performance and sculpture. With three other artists, he formed the Draga group, which explored ways to integrate art into public life. At this time, he formed an organization with indigenous friends from South American called Incomindios, which attempted to coordinate and encourage support for the struggle of Indians of the Americas. A lifelong activist, in 1973 he returned to the United States to participate in the occupation at Wounded Knee, in South Dakota, and became a full-time organizer for the American Indian Movement (AIM); he would become a member of their Central Council in 1975. That same year he became the executive director of the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) in New York City and was made the representative of American Indians to the United Nations, the first minority group to have official representation within the organization. From 1975 to 1980, he was the coeditor of the Treaty Council News, a monthly newspaper of the IITC, and edited the second edition of the Chronicles of American Indian Protest in 1976, published by the Council on Interracial Books for Children. In 1980 he quit AIM and returned to a focus on art making. Throughout this decade his work addressed questions of identity, modes of representation, and colonial violence and genocide, specifically related to the experiences of indigenous peoples in the Americas. He was the director of the Foundation for the Community of Artists in New York City from 1981 to 1983, and from 1982 to 1985 edited their monthly Art and Artists Newspaper (formerly Artworkers News). In 1987 Durham moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, and in 1994 immigrated to Europe. He has lived in Dublin, Brussels, Marseille, and Rome, and currently splits his time between Berlin and Naples. Since moving to Europe, his work has been less explicitly about his personal experiences or background and has addressed cultural politics more broadly, returning to subjects such as language and translation, monumentality, history, and ideology. During this time, Durham has repeatedly scrutinized two aspects he considers to be at the heart of European tradition: architecture and belief systems. Durham has professed a desire to remain “homeless,” living everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. Durham’s exhibition history spans several decades and continents. Recent solo exhibitions include Here at the Center, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2015); Venice: Objects, Work and Tourism, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (2015); and Various Items and Complaints, Serpentine Gallery, London (2015). Group shows include Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014); the Whitney Biennial (2014); and Documenta (2012), among many others. A retrospective of his work—A Matter of Life and Death and Singing—was organized by the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp (2012), and a survey of his work from 1994 forward, Pierres rejetées... (Rejected stones…), took place at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2009). Additional solo exhibitions include Varios y Diversos, Kurimanzutto, Mexico City (2013); Wood, Stone and Friends, Palazzo Reale–Sala Dorica, Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples (2012); Rocks Encouraged, Portikus, Frankfurt (2010); Universal Miniature Golf (The Promised Land), the Glasgow International Festival (2010); Between the Furniture and the Building (Between a Rock and a Hard Place), Kunstverein Munich (1998), among many others. Durham’s works are included in major public collections around the world, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Tate Modern, London; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and Museo Jumex, Mexico City, among others. An essayist and poet, Durham has published many texts in journals such as Artforum, Art Journal, and Third Text. His book of poems, Columbus Day, was published in 1983 by West End Press, Minneapolis. His collected essays, A Certain Lack of Coherence, was published in 1993 by Kala Press. In 2013 Jimmie Durham: Waiting to Be Interrupted, Selected Writings 1993–2012 was published by Mousse Publishing and Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp (with a Spanish translation forthcoming), and his book of poetry Poems That Do Not Go Together was published by Edition Hansjörg Maye.