Jimmie Durham

In the wake of the successful presentation of the celebrated “Venus of the rags” by Michelangelo Pistoletto in the enchanting scenario of the Donnaregina Vecchia gothic church, the Madre Museum of Naples is going to show an exhibition project by Jimmie Durham in partnership with the Morra Greco Foundation.

Jimmie Durham is a Cherokee, born in Arkansas (USA) in 1940. He is a visual artist, but also an essayist and a political activist with the American Indian Movement. Mainly committed to theatre and performance in the 1960s-70s, from the 1980s he began to create strange objects, assemblages and installations inspired by his culture, that he uses to deconstruct stereotypes and biases of western culture. This earned him the reputation of being one of the leading artists of the international current that draws inspiration from anthropology and postcolonialism themes. He participated to several international exhibitions, such as Documenta IX in 1992 and the 50th Venice Biennale. His works are ironic but incisive attacks on western culture, still permeated by a colonial structure, through a critical analysis of the relationship between society and architecture seen as monumentality. Ironic and witty, Durham’s work responds to the scepticism of western culture towards different beliefs and ways of life by re-using waste materials: a plastic tube or a stick are not a snake, but they can act as one.

For the project at the Madre Museum, Durham will show three installations lent by the Morra Greco Foundation, including a work shown for the first time which consists in reinforced concrete cubes that create an imaginary human-scale forest dried up by a mysterious acid rain. The “Petrified Forest” (2003) instead, consists in office furniture and furnishings, such as computers and faxes, covered by stones and concrete, just as if lava had erupted on them. The public can hardly find their way through these narrow meanders, feeling a sense of anguish for the catastrophe that has occurred, but also a sense of release from the alienation of everyday working routine. In “Something… Perhaps a Fugue or an Elegy” (2005), presented at the Venice Biennale, the horizontal assemblage of waste materials and objects that apparently have no connection between them forms an enigmatic totem: a sort of counter-mechanism open to any interpretation.

All images Courtesy Fondazione Donnaregina and Fondazione Morra Greco, Napoli