The Curve, Barbican
19.09 - 05.01.2025

“World-building” and the construction of “imagined worlds” sit at the centre of visual artist Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s practice. With a vision to create “a building within a building,” ‘It Will End In Tears’ – the artist’s first major UK commission – is the culmination of a two-year collaboration with the Barbican Centre, London. Here, Sunstrum has tipped her hat to the Barbican’s celebrated film and theatre legacy, and has transformed the unconventional space of the Curve Gallery into an immersive world, producing an interconnected map of film sets comprised of plywood ramps, walkways, stairs and domestic interiors, designed in collaboration with Remco Osório Lobato. Life-size dioramas curve around the spine of the gallery, as the exhibition’s narrative is broken up, much like a screenplay, into key locations such as a train station waiting room, a household interior and a front porch. It is up to visitors – as active participants – to move through the space and piece together this “drama in parts.” 

For the exhibition, Sunstrum has created a total of nineteen paintings, all oil and pencil on wood panels. The first painting, entitled Scene 1, 2024, shows Bettina – an alter ego – in a fur coat and cloche hat, returning home to an “undisclosed mid-century colonial outpost” – loosely based on the artist’s grandmother’s village in Botswana – exploring ideas around empire, identity and belonging. As the narrative unfolds, we watch as our female protagonist attempts to acclimatise to her new life of stifling rural domesticity. 

The architecture of the space and the works are in a dialogue here; where the space says curve, the artist has responded with line. In places, Sunstrum has forcefully worked into the surface of the wood panels; there is almost a violence to the way in which lines have been gone over again and again, hinting at the silent suggestion of danger hanging in the air. In other parts, the surface is left largely unresolved or totally bare, bringing attention to the works’ materiality and form. The artist tells me: “When I think about the thinness of the paintings, I realise that is a reflection of my interest in softness. What is still strong in something soft, that seems like it is about to fade away – can it still persist and can it still communicate?” In other areas, rather brilliantly, the grain of the wood reveals itself, and is incorporated into the composition; as a swirling sky at an ambiguous hour, or the surface of a kitchen table, upon which a hand is poised. 

Drawing on a variety of sources, the artist – whose early background is in academia – describes her practice as very citational. “That multiplicitous approach to information, history and knowledge, and finding coincidences and things being repeated across different disciplines is always interesting to me.” Citing film noir and theatre as her starting point, Sunstrum tells me: “Films of the western tradition from the 50’s and 60’s had a strong connection to theatre. Directors understood the frame, which came very closely out of theatre as a tradition.” For this body of work, the artist has looked to the films of Alfred Hitchcock, such as Rear Window and Vertigo, and Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire, with their reliance on extreme contrasts, dramatic lighting and epic shadows.

Writers such as Bessie Head and Ben Okri are Sunstrum’s bedrock influences. “One of the most powerful things about Bessie Head’s writing is her ability to point to these small subtleties and draw them out in this beautiful language. Even though you know she’s describing something very small, trivial, rural and isolated, it’s easy to understand that she’s talking about much larger things. She’s talking about the world and our systems and structures of power without having to name them, or bring them into the story at all.” Ben Okri’s magical realism is also highly significant. “It’s such a powerful form for me as it stands so firmly in the real world and in this other world that we sometimes get a chance to taste and experience, but not very often. In his writing, you’ll be in the grit and grime of real life, in a very real world, and in the next sentence, he pulls that all away from you, and you’re in the spirit world. I love the experiential power of that, of allowing there to be some ambiguity between what’s real in the world and what’s made up when it comes to power.”

Through the plight of Bettina, the exhibition plays with hierarchies of power. Alongside Sunstrum’s 2023 exhibition at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, entitled ‘You’ll Be Sorry’, the exhibition’s title is both a threat and a promise. “It’s a warning that I’ve heard before. For daring to step out, for daring to do it on my own, or to do it my own way. It’s a language of control for women who are dangerous, who are questioning the status quo, who are using their own facility in whatever way they must in order to get what they want. The titles are a way of reclaiming that threat.”

Here, the artist challenges the often reductive and misogynistic femme fatale trope, calling into question what it means to be a ‘dangerous woman’. “It’s such a nice trope to play with because it’s so familiar. We know who the femme fatale is; she’s the sexy woman, the woman draped in fur and swirling with cigarette smoke. She does whatever she has to do to get what she needs.” She elaborates; “I’m really interested in complicating that. What are those needs and where do they stem from? Could they be more complex than this simple ‘Jezebel’ narrative? I’m asking what are the larger conditions that create a situation where a woman must operate in this way in order to survive.”

Sunstrum’s ever-evolving cast of alter-egos add to this complication. As in her wider practice, the artist creates multiple figures who share her likeness, but are not self-portraits. She tells me: “I like the confusion that it brings, when you see a figure doubled or tripled, and then you have to ask yourself is that the same figure, are they twins, is it a figure that I’m seeing in different moments?” Indeed, is the figure mundanely drying a bowl with a dishcloth in one frame (Scene 14, 2024)  the same figure brandishing a knife in another? (Scene 42, 2024). It pushes back against an idea of a linear and finite narrative, and begs the question: are we looking at a memory, a hope, an unforgettable past, or an inescapable future? 

As for the story, it was important for Sunstrum not to totally give the game away. “There’s something powerful about withholding. So much of what we consume today is in pursuit of a completion. Everything is complete and clear. More and more, it’s not enough to look at something. I find it really important to resist that. To ask people to do some of the work for themselves,” she says. ‘It Will End in Tears’ is all about what it means to look.  As we travel through Sunstrum’s imagined worlds, we observe the works through windows and doorways that offer moveable views and frameworks. These frameworks draw attention to what you can see and, possibly more importantly, what you cannot, asking you to consider what conclusions you may draw based on what fragment of the narrative you’re able to see at any one time. The line between voyeurism and participation is distorted here, prompting us to dig deep into our own lived experiences, asking how we can see ourselves in Bettina, and how we can place ourselves in this world. Here, Sunstrum – who has always “looked at the world as if it’s filled with clues” – is asking you to trust the process, and to look, and look again.