Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum Dossier 2024

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: The Gods and The Underdogs
KM21 Den Haag, Netherlands 
22 June - 20 October 2024

KM21 proudly presents artist Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s (b. 1980, Botswana) first solo museum show in Europe. The exhibition will include an overview of recent drawings and paintings that have never before been shown in the Netherlands. Sunstrum will also create a site-specific installation at KM21, based on two large new paintings which she will combine with historic items of furniture from Kunstmuseum Den Haag’s large decorative arts collection, in a unique interaction between contemporary art and cultural heritage. 

Inspired by the art of landscape painting, from Dutch skies to the more geometric vistas of South African painter Jacobus Hendrik Pierneef (1886-1957), Sunstrum creates a patchwork of remembered landscapes from her childhood, which she spent in a number of countries, including Botswana, Canada, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Malawi and Panama. Her work overlaps to some extent with afrofuturism, in which artists and thinkers from the African diaspora depict a future beyond the framework of oppression, with elements of science fiction and fantasy. Sunstrum, too, questions whether ‘traditional’ history should simply be accepted as it is taught. As she puts it: ‘Our history is important, too. Identity is as much ancestral as it is futuristic, in this constant state of becoming.’

The title of the exhibition, The Gods and The Underdogs, comes from an essay by the influential South African writer Bessie Head (1937-1986). From 1964 onwards she lived in Botswana, having been issued an ‘exit permit’ which permitted her to leave South Africa but never to return, under the apartheid laws in force at the time. Exit Permit is also the title of Sunstrum’s new installation, which consists of two large paintings shown in a staged setting with items of furniture from Kunstmuseum Den Haag’s decorative arts collection. The setting, which recalls a waiting room, refers to the colonial  outposts that still exist in Botswana (and other countries) today: bureaucratic, makeshift headquarters where decisions about individual lives were taken.

The other drawings and paintings in the exhibition, many of which have never before been shown in Europe, also explore this history, from multiple perspectives. We see women in their Sunday best waiting on wooden benches, a parade of schoolgirls in uniform, ghostly ancestral apparitions, and extinct animals of the steppe. The layered works, full of colour, are both tender and defiant, intimate and monumental at the same time. Together, they raise urgent, topical questions about power relations, displacement, identity and autonomy, about gods and underdogs.

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: It Will End In Tears 
Forthcoming Solo Exhibition: Barbican, London, UK
18 September 2024 - 5 January 2025

From 18 September 2024, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum will transform The Curve with a large-scale installation filling the length of the Barbican’s cornerless gallery in her first solo exhibition at a major UK institution. Expanding her ongoing interest in narrative world-building, Sunstrum has produced a series of drawings, paintings and installation to tell the story of a brand new character in the artist’s ever-growing cast of alter-egos. 

The expansive installation, designed uniquely for The Curve in collaboration with Remco Osório Lobato, will draw visitors into the everyday of a rural life in an imagined twentieth-century colonial outpost, based loosely on the hometown of Sunstrum’s grandmother in Botswana. Resembling an interconnected map of film sets, visitors will piece together a drama in parts as they move through domestic space, colonial bureaucracies, and travel waiting rooms – immersed in the world created by the artist and blurring the boundaries between spectatorship and participation. 

This new body of work takes inspiration from crime fiction novels and mid-century genres such as film noir, challenging the femme fatale archetype which uses reductive and often misogynistic tropes to represent women across literature, art and cinema. Through the new series, Sunstrum draws from her experience living in different parts of Africa, South Asia and North America to examine the notions of home, hybrid identities and wholeness.

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Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: You'll be sorry
Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
26 October - 24 November 2023

Goodman Gallery presents You’ll be sorry, an exhibition of new large-scale paintings by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum. This body of work, created in Sunstrum’s new studio in The Hague, unpacks the concept of homecoming and expands on a core thematic impulse in her practice: the push and pull between the personal and the universal narrative, presenting cinematic scenes that slip between the real and the imagined.

You’ll be sorry marks Sunstrum’s first solo presentation in the Johannesburg gallery, a city that played a significant role in shaping the artist’s identity post international studies and her residency at the Bag Factory in 2010 where Sunstrum worked alongside the likes of the late David Koloane and Sam Nghlengthwa.

Featured works play out the fictional narrative of a femme fatale figure who embodies the precarity, suspicion and defiance that comes with a return and desire for access. The figure is seen in gathering spaces; lines outside bureaucratic buildings, seating areas outside the home, by the river. Occupying the liminal spaces of colonial outposts and government offices, the vulnerability of requesting permission to leave or stay is poignant. It brings to the surface the residue and hierarchy of colonial power structures. The figure’s ambiguity is highlighted through her staged positions and disjointed placement within the environment, coupled with her translucent appearance. This provides an interrogation of border politics in the geopolitical sense as well as a feeling of being on the border, an outsider, within one’s immediate circumstances.

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Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: The Pavilion
London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE, London
27 July 2023 - 20 January 2024

In 2023, London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE presented The Pavilion, the first UK solo exhibition at a public institution by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum. Central to the installation was a wooden pavilion-like structure designed in collaboration with Remco Osório Lobato, comprised of a promenade of interrelated viewing booths reminiscent of Victorian ‘cabinets of curiosities’, often considered as precursors to museums. The structure housed an archive of Sunstrum’s animations dating from 2007-2016, that drew on the artist’s own fascination with ancient mythologies, scientific theories, mythological archetypes and the cosmos.

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Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: All my seven faces
Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, United States
12 July - 27 October 2019

In this exhibition, Sunstrum used video, animation, and avatars named Asme (“as me”) to explore surprising parallels across modern science and ancient texts.

All my seven faces featured over 20 works including a new, large scale mural to create a re-imagining of her own life/timeline. By design, the exhibition conjured a transformative space that evoked the impression of traveling through a tunnel. Visual nods to elements of Tswana home adornment traditions as well as sand embankments along the perimeter of the gallery where the walls met the floor heightened this sense of passage and location. The visitor’s journey through the exhibition culminated in a new mural on a grand-scale that responded to Zaha Hadid’s architecture like never before. The mural presented a pair of Asme in the midst of traditional housing leading into futuristic constructions and civilization, the overall shape of which forms an arch between where the artist is from and what the future holds.