Ro U T I N G H O M E W I T H C a R L O S B U N G A

To coincide with Angolan-Portugese artist's largest exhibition to date, entitled Habitar a Contradição (Inhabit the Contradiction), the exhibition, curated by Rui Mateus Amaral, artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA), originates from one of Bunga's surrealist drawings—A Minha Primeira Casa Foi Uma Mulher 1975 (My First House Was a Woman 1975) (2018)—which evokes the journey of the artist's mother, pregnant, from Angola to Portugal in 1975, fleeing the civil war to save her two-year-old daughter and her unborn son. The closing essay, "Routing Home with Carlos Bunga" uses the epistolary form as a means to convey both the author and artist's interior psychological states. To challenge hegemonic concepts of nomadism; to embrace the aesthetic possibilities of wandering, even in instances of longing for a site of belonging.