“What makes a man start fires?” – Talk and performance by Carlos Bunga with Roland Groenenboom

Both Bunga and Miró are of the opinion that fire does not destroy but transforms the work. Following in the footsteps of Joan Miró, Carlos Bunga will work on the canvases with fire in an intimate, spectators-free act. The installation of the transformed works in the exhibition will be carried out by the artist in a performative, public and interactive act together with Roland Groenenboom. This act intertwines interview, poetry and other texts related to the work of Bunga and Miró, as well as fire, resulting in a new intangible and transient canvas.

Biographies

Carlos Bunga © Eva Plasencia

Carlos Bunga (Porto, Portugal, 1976) studied at the School of Art and Design of Caldas da Rainha, in Portugal. He currently lives and works in Barcelona. Bunga is known for his poetic and radical exploration of the polymorphic materiality of art. In his work, matter can take the form of a shelter, a model, a performative field, a support for cartography, a prototype, a trace, a mark, a vestige, a ruin or a larva. His mastery of various media underpins a nomadic practice driven by a fascination with potential forms.

The ambiguity of his architectural sculptures and paintings on cardboard, wood or canvas situates much of his work between what has been and what could be: past and future, ruin and prototype, absence and utopia.

In his exhibition project “New Life After the Fire”, Bunga works with everyday objects, as well as with traditional materials from the island that allow him to connect with the landscape, drawing inspiration from Miró’s interest in constant experimentation, process, and the physical incorporation of the object as sculpture. At the same time, she explores the powerful image and connotations of fire and its various uses and symbolic meanings, as well as the inherent transformation its use implies. Far from destruction, it will be a generator of new life.

Bunga has exhibited solo at numerous museums, including the Pinacoteca of São Paulo (2010), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011), Serralves Museum, Porto (2012), University Museum of Contemporary Art, Mexico City (2013), Haus Konstruktiv Museum, Zurich (2015), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2015), MOCA, Detroit (2018), MAAT, Lisbon (2019), MOCA Toronto (2020), Whitechapel, London (2020), Secession, Vienna (2021), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2022), Palacio de Cristal, MNCARS, Madrid (2022), Aranya Art Center, Beidaihe, China (2025) or the Centre for Modern Art, Gulbenkian Foundation (2025).

Her work has been included in various group exhibitions at Artists Space, New York (2005), the New Museum, New York (2007), the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art (2009), the National Museum of Cardiff (2014) and the Guggenheim Bilbao (2016). Bunga has participated in Manifesta 5 in San Sebastián (2004), inSite_05 at the San Diego Museum of Art (2005); the 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010); Arts Mundi 6 in Cardiff (2013); the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2015); the 35th São Paulo Biennial (2023); Manifesta 15 in Barcelona; the Pontevedra Biennial (2025), among others.

Roland Gronenboom (Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 1965). Lives and works between the Netherlands and the Terres de l’Ebre. He is a curator, author and editor. He has worked as a curator at Witte de With, a centre for contemporary art in Rotterdam, the Netherlands (now Kunstinstituut Melly), where he organised exhibitions such as retrospectives of Paul Thek and Tacita Dean. He subsequently worked as a curator at MACBA in Barcelona, where he organised retrospectives of Fischli Weiss, Raymond Pettibon and Dias & Riedweg, among others. As an independent curator, he has conceived and produced exhibitions and publications for institutions across Europe, such as the travelling group exhibition Sonic Youth etc.: Sensational Fix. He contributed exhibition reviews to the weekly cultural supplement of La Vanguardia, and published interviews with, among others, Tacita Dean, Richard Hamilton, Muntadas, Miralda and Zeger Reyers, as well as essays on the work of Paul Thek, Sonic Youth, Tellervo Kalleinen and Carlos Bunga. Between 2009 and 2010, they published a series of five themed fanzines focusing on art and music under the title Sensational Fix Zine. Artists such as Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, Tony Oursler, Christian Marclay, Richard Kern, Cameron Jamie and Marnie Weber contributed to these fanzines. Between 2015 and 2016, he lived and worked in Houston, Texas, where he organised the exhibition and live performance The Silencers and The Refused by the New Zealand experimental artist and musician Michael Morley (The Dead C, GATE). In 2019, they organised Music for The Never Quartet, the European premiere of a live composition for four acoustic guitars and e-bows by Michael Morley. In 2024, they created an installation with their own ceramics, drawings, paintings, music and poetry, titled Less is more but it’s never enough, in Móra la Nova, Tarragona. With his trio Rosco Chapel, which also features electronic music pioneer Truus de Groot and multi-instrumentalist Kathy Ziegler, he released the digital albums Impermanence (2019) and Aixopluc (2025).

You can find all the information about Carlos Bunga’s exhibition “New Life After Fire” here>