Deleite

One of the most important names at Inhotim’s collection, Tunga has played a key role in defining the concept of the collection and developing it into what it is today. His Deleite (1999) is one of the first works to be part of the collection and to be installed in Inhotim. By way of bells, canes, magnets, chains and iron-and-leather stools – recurring objects and materials in Tunga’s poetics – the artist creates a situation in which fantasy drives a prolific symbolic narrative with multifold meanings, blending fact with fiction. His installations commonly involve a multiplication of objects as an allusion to excess, while clearly evincing the constitutive materials and the mixtures that defy the physical qualities of the elements considered individually. An architect by training, in his works Tunga includes references to literature and philosophy as well as biology, zoology, medicine, archaeology and the hard sciences. Since the 1970s, Tunga has been resorting to various supports, with an emphasis on installations and sculptures, though he has also staged performances with the participation of actors. In some of his artworks the installation appears as a record of an action or the memory of the presence of the body and of life itself.