Tunga
(Palmares, Brasil, 1952)

Tunga (born Jose de Barros Carvalho e Mello) worked in sculpture, installation, photography, poetry, and video. His site-specific installations transform galleries into dreamlike environments with an array of materials, including plastic, thread, and repurposed objects. Though materially intensive, Tunga’s practice was highly conceptual—his works are intentionally enigmatic, meant to resist certainty and confound viewers. For À la Lumière des Deux Mondes (At the Light of Both Worlds) (2007), he hung from a gallery ceiling a massive assemblage of bones, iron, bundles of skulls, metal wire, and bronze replicas of classical sculpture sheathed in mesh, a commentary on the delicate balance between life and death