Double Architecture
Views of the installation. ⓒ Carlos Bunga.
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. MOCAD +info
Bunga’s installation relies on his usual materials: cardboard, glue, and tape. Piecing together these elements, he forms a spiraling maze within the museum’s gallery that doubles and heightens our sense of enclosure. Echoing the rawness of the building through its simple materials, Bunga’s labyrinth creates both an architectural space and a psychological enclosure. Forcing visitors into a space of contemplation, quiet, and confinement, the installation encourages a confrontation with the self, an examination of our own interiority within the constructed space of its cardboard walls.
Bunga creates mirrors of the space the work occupies, constructs complex labyrinths that shroud visitors inside brown and white walls, and intervenes directly into the architecture of a given space, dealing with the ways in which our built environments impact, guide, and occasionally fail us. Physical structures also act as analogs for forms and patterns of thought. Destruction, displacement, and repetition are tropes that the artist returns to again and again, each act of creation and disassembly eating away at our sense of architecture’s solidity, and with it, our grasp on our own ideological defaults.
Bunga’s installations have strong phenomenological effects, transporting us somewhere else, altering our senses of ourselves and carrying us on an ambiguous temporal journeys. Working through these gestures of negation and transformation, Bunga recalls the artistic interventions of Michael Heizer, Gordon Matta Clark, and Lawrence Weiner, who also carved into, dug up, cut apart, reconfigured, and altered both landscapes and architectures. His works, like theirs, are both poetic and raw, aesthetically simple and conceptually complex.
View of the installation. ⓒ Carlos Bunga.
Curator: Jens Hoffmann
2018. Detroit, United States.
Presentation. Carlos Bunga talks about his process, MoCAD.
