“When we walk in that space,” explains the Portuguese installation artist Carlos Bunga, “we are walking between the past and the future, and we are the present.” What better to way to portray the present than by using the common materials of today? In Whitechapel’s hallowed halls, Bunga creates architectural spaces out of cardboard and repurposes domestic furnishings to construct monumental works. The powerful place that results, a sort of nameless city, was inspired by the spiritual simplicity of the American Shakers—a Christian sect in which the use of the hands, the making of things, is a form of prayer. —E.C.