Carlos Bunga presents one of his most complex and personal exhibitions to date, and his largest site-specific cardboard installation, which includes works from the CAM Collection.
Carlos Bunga (Porto, 1976) has developed an artistic practice concerned with the possibilities of form. What began as his inquiry into the limits of painting has grown into a way of working that hybridizes supports and surfaces until painting becomes a space of activity. His process resonates with the experiments of conceptual and performance artists of the 1960s and ’70s, whose use of simple, iterative gestures generated sensory and emotional force. Over the years, his oeuvre has come to encompass drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, and video.
Working with provisional materials – cardboard, paint, and tape – Bunga’s most recognized projects reinterpret the architectures he is invited to engage with at full scale. Works such as ‘Ruin’ (2008), ‘Landscape’ (2011), ‘Chapel’ (2015), ‘Home’ (2022) and now ‘Bosque’ Forest, trace this evolution and the artist’s nomadic paths. Materially fragile yet structurally sound, and intentionally destined for transformation, these works echo the ever-changing nature of built and organic environments and the enduring search, across species, for a space, a place, or a community to return to.
‘Inhabit the Contradiction’ originates from one of Bunga’s surreal drawings: ‘My First House Was a Woman, 1975’ (2018). It depicts a pregnant figure with a house for a head, limbs rendered as both human and animal-like, and a colonial-era stamp crossing the torso. Referencing his mother’s abrupt passage from Angola to Portugal, the artwork is a personal point of departure. Like life itself, the exhibition expands outward into a multifaceted experience shaped by remembrance, change, and the convergences of home, body, mind, and universe.
Within CAM’s multiple galleries and the surrounding garden, architectural interventions merge with found materials and painterly gestures. Movement, ephemera, and selections from the institution’s archive and collection layer the exhibition into a meditation on absence and reinvention, and on the complexity of holding multiple, often conflicting truths at the same time.
