"Habitar A Contradição" (Inhabiting Contradiction) Exhibition At CAM Calouste Gulbenkian FoundationIn Lisbon

LISBON, PORTUGAL - NOVEMBER 6: (L-R) Portuguese artist Carlos Bunga, known for his installations out of mass-produced materials like cardboard, duct tape and home paint, presents his exhibition "Habitar A Contradição" (Inhabiting Contradiction) with Curator Rui Mateus Amaral, artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA) at CAM Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation on November 6, 2025 in Lisbon, Portugal. Carlos Bunga presents one of his most complex and personal exhibitions to date, and his largest site-specific cardboard installation, which includes works from the CAM Collection. "Inhabit the Contradiction" originates from one of Bunga’s surreal drawings: "My First House Was a Woman, 1975" depicting 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 exhibition expands outward into a multifaceted experience shaped by remembrance, change, and the convergences of home, body, mind, and universe. 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. (Footage by Horacio Villalobos/Getty Images)