Inhabit the contradiction

Solo exhibitionsPaintingSite specificMuseum

Nov 13

Written By Lou Calderón

Exhibition setup. Photos: Fábio Cunha

Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian +info

This is one of Bunga’s most complex and personal exhibitions to date, with his largest site-specific cardboard installation, which includes works from the CAM Collection. 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] (2025), 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.

This exhibition 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.

VIEWS OF THE EXHIBITION