About the work

Carlos Bunga has created two silkscreen and paper collage works to accompany his Whitechapel Gallery exhibition, Carlos Bunga: Something Necessary and Useful (21 January – 6 September 2020).

These two editions are a continuation of Bunga’s ongoing series of drawings and works on paper titled ‘Nomads' which portray hybrid figures carrying architecture in the place of their heads.

Bunga’s work shifts between the architectural spaces of house and city and a more personal psychic space. His evolving installations of everyday and domestic materials explore how we experience and necessarily coexist with the built environment.

For Bunga architecture has the ability to influence and mould us to believe in utopias, where a fictional reality seems possible. This ecosystem produced between people and buildings is one where we are constantly left learning to adapt to the transitory. Bunga reflects on the nature of living in more than one place, of travelling back and forth. He says "our society is a nomadic space. I feel I´m nomadic too."

About the artist

Carlos Bunga (b. 1976 Porto) attended the Escola Superior de Arte e Design in Caldas da Rainha in Portugal. He currently lives and works near Barcelona.

Bunga creates site-specific installations using mass-produced materials such as cardboard, adhesive tape, and household paint. Responding to their settings, these ephemeral structures recall theatre sets, architectural models, as well as temporary shelters. Through his work, Bunga invites the viewers to rethink their experience of painting, objects and architecture. By giving equal importance to the creation, movement and destruction of the work, he also evokes the transient and fragile nature of urban structures, and the traces of his works bring to mind dispossession and the symbolic potential of ruins.

Selected Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions include: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011), Museu Serralves, Porto (2012), Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2013), Haus Konstruktiv Museum, Zurich (2015) and the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2015) and Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), Lisbon (2019), Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto and Secession, Vienna (both 2020). Group exhibitions include: Manifesta 5, San Sebastián (2004), the New Museum, New York (2007), Warsaw Museum of Modern Art (2009), 14th Carrara International Sculpture Biennial (2010),  29th São Paulo Biennial (2010), Artes Mundi 6, Cardiff (2013), and the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2015).