Carlos Bunga: Citizen of the World

Based in Barcelona but born in Porto in 1976 to an Angolan mother who had fled Angola during the War of Independence (1961–74), Carlos Bunga is, it is fair to say, preoccupied with notions of home. Installed across the third-floor gallery and the large ground-floor window, Bunga’s exhibition Citizen of the World at the New Art Gallery Walsall assembles works that consider this subject in relation to migration, psychology, architecture, furniture, non-human homes and the human body.

The previously unseen suite of works on paper Nomad FIG.1 combines simple line drawings of the human figure – many of whom are shown in a state of motion that resembles a dancer mid-step, albeit with claw or flipper-like hands and feet – with renderings of the artist’s former homes, which are drawn, somewhat surreally, in place of the figures’ heads. The first of these depicts the artist’s first home: his mother’s womb.¹ This place of safety and security is in marked contrast to the next two, located in Porto, both buildings for returnees and refugees from former Portuguese colonies, one of which was previously used as a political prison. A series of Bunga’s notes available in the gallery offers detailed reflections on his varying personal and professional experiences within each location. Further homes – some with palm trees or windmills – in Amsterdam, Helsinki, Mexico City, New York, Madrid, Chicago and Bogotá, among other locations, follow, with the last work portraying the artist’s studio in Barcelona, a place he describes as ‘the home of his head’.² The figure in this drawing has its arms outstretched in joy.

In the short video More Space for Other Constructions FIG.2, Bunga can be seen erasing pencil drawings of houses, rendering them temporary through their near total removal from the page. The artist’s statement is undoubtedly a political one, but he also speaks to the idea of making something new from the obliteration of existing work by revisiting ideas and materials. As a large projection in a gallery all to itself, the work is imposing in its intentions and presentation. Despite appearances, however, Bunga does not frame his practice in terms of architectural methodologies or perspectives. Instead, he compares his approach to a bird building nests.³ A series of five drawings of birds in flight are, in fact, hung high up on the gallery walls. Delicately drawn in pencil on tracing paper, these evoke themes of migration and freedom, offering optimism and a lightness of touch. Less convincing are a pair of newly commissioned latex and plaster cocoon sculptures hung from the ceiling: their fleshy, uncertain forms are incongruously staged against the simplicity of Bunga’s drawings and the economy of means shown in works elsewhere.

Bunga is well-known for his preoccupation with and use of cardboard. Indeed, large sheets of cardboard are one of the few materials purchased for the exhibition, featuring throughout the majority of the works in the spacious first third-floor gallery. Bunga spent three weeks in Walsall, making the work and installing the display. Unlike the all-encompassing environments of his previous shows at Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 2020 and MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, in 2006, Animism FIG.3 comprises a series of separate but connected works. They incorporate cardboard, textiles, tape and locally sourced mid-century furniture; many have painted elements, making use of leftover tins of emulsion from past exhibitions at the gallery. The visitor is able to move around the individual pieces comfortably. An analogy that Bunga is keen to deploy is a connection to choreography, both in his own life, on-site making processes and in the viewer’s movement through or around his three-dimensional installations.⁴ The artist explored similar themes at Whitechapel Gallery, where he invited the British-Irish artist and choreographer Joe Moran to develop a dance commission in response to his solo exhibition Something Necessary and Useful.⁵

There are, however, exceptions to the easy navigation of the sculptures here. A series of wooden chairs are sliced in half and positioned against the walls in a gesture that is suggestive of play but also defiant in its refusal of the objects’ intended purpose. An ostensible simplicity characterises many of the works in this group. Take, for example, a metal bedframe that is positioned upside down, seemingly propped up on flimsy cardboard pillars, inaccessible and flush with the gallery ceiling. Other pieces of furniture, such as tables and sideboards, are turned upside down or placed on their sides, occasionally with cardboard boxes, cardboard tubes or blankets piled on top, revealing unexpected angles and new geometries. The works that make up Animism recall the kind of stacking and precision placement required when loading such domestic objects into moving vans or storage units. Here, Bunga plays with weight, lightness and balance, asking questions about value and use.

Another of Bunga’s commissions, House as a Skin FIG.4, is made up of suspended fabrics, which are arranged loosely in the approximate form of a house. With a sizable exterior ‘skin’ made up of vintage textiles and cleaning rags stitched together in his Barcelona studio, the piece’s interior walls are composed of the gallery’s own dust sheets and blankets – objects often used in the installation of exhibitions. Here, the means of facilitation are co-opted into the materials of the work in a frugal and resourceful way. Inviting the viewer inside its soft and enveloping form, House as a Skin bears echoes of the remarkable photograph by Donald Rodney, In the House of My Father (1996–97), in which Rodney’s hand cradles a miniature house made up of fragments of his own skin.⁶ Dust sheets are also stacked in neat piles in the corners of the gallery, a reference to their origin and intended context in Bunga’s embrace of everyday and functional materials.

A handful of existing works on paper and sculptures are also included, such as Nomad. House no.17 FIG.5, a human figure whose ‘head’ is modelled on one of the artist’s former homes, which was built to house refugees and impoverished Portuguese families. The dimensions of the body are taken from Bunga’s young daughter. The sculpture looks out over Walsall through one of the gallery windows, its back turned away from the rest of the exhibition. Elsewhere, Bunga’s continued use of humble and familiar materials further renders the idea of home as temporary, changeable and portable. His heavily textured work Untitled (The New Art Gallery Walsall) FIG.6, installed in the ground-floor street-facing window, incorporates twigs and leaves gathered close to Bunga’s Barcelona home, as well as two chairs, a stool and other detritus, collected from the streets of Walsall, including aluminium drink cans and torn scraps of cardboard. Coated thickly with a yellow-ochre household paint in long drips, this new work is the only one for which Bunga requested that a new and specific paint be purchased.³ The assemblage is completed by his paint-covered shoes poignantly positioned on the floor in the midst of the work, in an echo of Bunga’s absent body. The artist has already moved on to some place else.