Whitechapel Gallery

‘When we walk in that space we are walking between the past and the future and we are the present’. Carlos Bunga (b. 1976, Portugal) creates monumental structures out of everyday materials to propose architecture as transitory and corporeal in his first major commission in London.

Bunga makes cardboard constructions and repurposes domestic furnishings to create an evolving installation in dialogue with the historic interiors of the gallery and its public. He encourages us to get lost in the painted surfaces and openings he creates, to wander among items of adapted mobile furniture, and gaze up at large textured hanging canvases.

Bunga draws on his own experience of displacement and loss; but he is also inspired by the American Shaker movement’s insistence on simplicity in their interiors and furniture, exploring what is necessary and useful in art, architecture and design.

This new commission changes throughout the exhibition as it is cut by its maker, reconfigured and then destroyed. Bunga also invites the choreographer Joe Moran and dancers to perform in the gallery during the course of the exhibition, exploring their shared interest in the relationship among bodies, physical space and time.