Carlos Bunga: Inhabit the Contradiction

CAM presents “Habitar a Contradição” (“Inhabit the Contradiction”), the largest and most complex installation to date by Carlos Bunga, one of Portugal’s most internationally recognised artists. Curated by Rui Mateus Amaral, artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA), the exhibition originates from Bunga’s drawing “A Minha Primeira Casa Foi Uma Mulher 1975 (My First House Was a Woman 1975)”, which recalls his mother’s journey from Angola to Portugal in 1975 during the civil war.

Working with his signature materials — cardboard, paint and adhesive tape — Bunga transforms CAM’s Nave into a monumental forest of cylindrical forms, evoking both architectural and organic structures. The installation expands throughout the building, integrating sculptural interventions and everyday objects to create environments that blur the boundaries between public and domestic space.

Exploring the aesthetics of impermanence and the politics of survival, Bunga’s constructions invite reflection on displacement, fragility, and memory. In dialogue with rarely seen works from the CAM Collection, including pieces by Túlia Saldanha, Doris Salcedo, Francisco Tropa, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Keiichi Tahara, Larry Clark and Wolf Vostell, the exhibition examines ideas of absence, transformation and renewal.

A public programme of performances, readings, screenings and gatherings extends these themes, while an accompanying publication features texts by Rui Mateus Amaral, Carlos Bunga, Roland Groenenboom, Omar Kholeif, November Paynter, Rina Carvajal and Catarina Rosendo.