Lives in New York since 1965. Taught from 1967 to 2002 at The Cooper Union. Has produced sculptures, installations, paintings, photoworks, architectural proposals, posters, prints, texts and books, a stage-set, and has curated exhibitions with the collections of two museums. A large work was commissioned by the Bundestag (Germany Parliament) and, after a heated national debate, permanently installed in an open-air courtyard of the Reichstag, Berlin (2000).

Personal exhibitions at Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld (1972); Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1978); Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1979); Renaissance Society, Chicago (1979); Tate Gallery, London (1984); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1986); centre Pompidou, Paris (1989); Venice Biennial (1993); Fundación Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (1995); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1996); Portikus, Frankfurt (2000); Serpentine Gallery, London (2001); Generali Foundation, Vienna (2001); Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2005); Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany (2006); Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg, Germany (2008); 53rd Venice Biennale (2009); Foundazione Antonio Ratti, Como, Italy (2010); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2011); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (2012); and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2014).

Works exhibited in Documenta; the Biennials of Venice, São Paulo, Sydney, Tokyo, Johannesburg; and the Whitney Biennial, New York.

Shared with Man June Paik the Golden Lion for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennial 1993. In 1994, Éditions du Seuil and Les presses du réel published Libre Échange (Free Exchange), his conversation with the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu; in English by Stanford University Press and Polity Press, London, 1995 (translations also in Chinese, Finnish, German, Japanese and Portuguese).