Carlos Bunga: Inhabit the Contradiction

CAM presents the largest and most complex installation to date by Carlos Bunga (b. 1976), one of Portugal's most internationally renowned artists, born in Porto and currently living and working in Barcelona.

Entitled Habitar a Contradição (Inhabit the Contradiction), the exhibition, curated by Rui Mateus Amaral, artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA), originates from one of Bunga's surrealist drawings—A Minha Primeira Casa Foi Uma Mulher 1975 (My First House Was a Woman 1975) (2018)—which evokes the journey of the artist's mother, pregnant, from Angola to Portugal in 1975, fleeing the civil war to save her two-year-old daughter and her unborn son. 

Working, as usual, with fragile and temporary materials—cardboard, paint and adhesive tape—the artist has created a monumental forest of cylindrical shapes of different sizes for the CAM's Nave, evoking architectural columns and tree trunks, alongside several other sculptures, some of which are being exhibited for the first time. 

Exploring the aesthetics of the temporary and the politics of survival, Carlos Bunga's constructions envelop the visitor spatially and emotionally, evoking places of transitory shelter shaped by memory, trauma and the precariousness of life.

This installation, presented in dialogue with works from the CAM Collection selected by the artist, extends to other interior and exterior spaces of the building. The garden chairs are moved into the exhibition space, bringing the visual codes and energy of the outside in.

In the CAM Foyer, domestic objects such as tables, lamps, cabinets and rugs, intervened on by the artist, lend a feeling of home to a space that is, by definition, a place of passage. 

Invited to select works from the CAM Collection, Carlos Bunga chose works that are rarely or never shown, that defy easy classification and hover between states, or exist as ephemeral objects.

Some were acquired as instructional structures (Túlia Saldanha, Sala de Descontração [1975/76]) or require organic materials to grow again (Doris Salcedo, Pelagria Muda [2008]). Others are portable and adaptable sculptures (Francisco Tropa, Scripta [2018]), have missing counterparts (Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, A poesia está na rua I [1974]), or are distinguished by a striking play of light and shadow (Keiichi Tahara, Lisbonne, Eté [1988]).  Others are fragments of a larger series (Larry Clark, Gardens of Lisbon #3, #4, #6 [1988]) or are completed through active correspondence (Wolf Vostell, Além-Tejo Vos-Tejo [Lisbon, 15 May 1979]).

In addition to these, other works from the CAM Collection and the Art Library and Archives, brought together by the artist and curator for this exhibition, establish surprising bridges with Bunga's ephemeral works, helping to transform the exhibition into a meditation on absence, impermanence and reinvention.

The public programme of the exhibition—performances, readings, screenings and gatherings on Saturday nights—draw inspiration from Portuguese artist Fernando Calhau’s 1978 drawing Night Works, part of his larger project exploring nocturnal life with its symbolism and ghosts.

On March 14, Bunga will return to CAM to transform his work live before the public—cutting, collapsing, and recomposing it anew.

An extensive catalogue has been published with texts by Rui Mateus Amaral, Carlos Bunga, Roland Groenenboom, Omar Kholeif, November Paynter, Rina Carvajal and Catarina Rosendo.

Carlos Bunga 
Carlos Bunga (Porto, 1976) studied at the Higher School of Art and Design in Caldas da Rainha. Currently living and working in Barcelona, his work revolves around the possibilities of form. What began as an investigation into the limits of painting has become a work that hybridises supports and surfaces, where painting becomes a space for activity. His process echoes the experiences of conceptual and performance artists of the 1960s and 1970s, who used simple, iterative gestures to generate sensory and emotional intensity. Over the years, his work has expanded to include drawing, sculpture, installation, photography and video.

Rui Mateus Amaral
Rui Mateus Amaral (Ponta Delgada, Azores, 1988) is the artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto Canada (MOCA), where he has curated exhibitions by Alex Da Corte, Phyllida Barlow, Carlos Bunga, among others. In 2022 he organised Summer, Felix Gonzalez-Torres' first solo exhibition in Canada, and in 2021 he co-founded MOCA's triennial, Greater Toronto Art. From 2011 to 2020, Mateus Amaral directed the programme at Scrap Metal, a private exhibition space, working with artists such as Eduardo Basualdo, Eric N. Mack, and Paul P. His texts have been published in Artforum, and in 2022, he co-edited Garden Court by Scott Burton.