November 27, 2025 | Art & Culture
CARLOS BUNGA:
INHABITING CONTRADICTION
words YUZU Editorial
photos Pedro Pina
At Lisbon’s CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Portuguese-born and Barcelona-based artist Carlos Bunga unveils his most expansive installation to date — a work that gathers memory, displacement and architectural fragility into a single, quietly resonant gesture.
Inhabit the Contradiction, curated by Mocca Toronto's artistic director Rui Mateus Amaral, begins with one of Bunga’s own surrealist drawings, My First House Was a Woman.
The piece recalls his mother’s journey fleeing civil war in Angola in 1975 — pregnant, carrying her two-year-old daughter and unborn son toward an uncertain refuge in Portugal.
TEMPORARY STRUCTURES, LASTING ECHOES
Bunga’s practice has long resisted the notion of permanence. Using deceptively modest materials — cardboard, tape, paint — he builds forms that feel simultaneously monumental and vulnerable. His installations settle into space the way memories do: tentatively, in layers, shaped by the ongoing tension between making and unmaking.
In CAM’s Nave, cylindrical columns rise like a forest of improvised trunks, echoing both architecture and nature. Across the building, domestic objects — tables, lamps, cabinets, rugs — appear gently altered, as if carrying the trace of previous lives. Garden chairs are brought indoors, softening the boundary between museum and exterior.
These gestures create a loose architecture of belonging, attentive to how easily the concept of “home” can shift, dissolve or be rebuilt.
DIALOGUE WITH A COLLECTION IN FLUX
A striking dimension of the exhibition is Bunga’s engagement with CAM’s collection. The freedom to move experimentally through the institution’s holdings aligns with his ongoing exploration of thresholds — between the visible and the invisible, the public and the private, loss and recovery.
He gravitates toward works that resist easy category: installations that rely on organic material to regenerate, portable sculptures, incomplete sequences, shadow-driven photographs, pieces completed through correspondence. Placed alongside his own ephemeral structures, they form a meditation on absence, impermanence and reinvention.
Curator Rui Mateus Amaral frames the project within the paradox that shaped the Gulbenkian Foundation itself — an institution born after its founder’s death, marked by a man who lived nomadically and found refuge in Portugal during World War II. Bunga channels this tension, folding presence and absence, certainty and precarity into the exhibition’s core.
THE INSTALLATION’S MOST POWERFUL MOMENT
The most striking moment arrives not at the opening, but weeks later. On 14 March, Bunga will return to CAM to cut, collapse and recompose the installation in real time. Creation becomes performance; structure gives way to movement; destruction becomes another form of drawing.
Inhabit the Contradiction offers no tidy resolution — and that is its strength. It invites visitors to stand within the unstable spaces where life rearranges itself. In Bunga’s hands, fragility becomes a structure, and impermanence a way of seeing.
