Pamela Phatsimo SunstrumThe Interview II, 2023
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s ‘Interview II’ evokes the bureaucratic spaces of colonial administration – border posts, visa offices, waiting rooms – where power dynamics are quietly but forcefully enacted. Drawing on her childhood memories of landscapes across Botswana, Canada, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Malawi, and Panama, Sunstrum constructs a backdrop that shifts between the imagined and the remembered, shaped by her fascination with Dutch skies and the structured compositions of South African painter Jacobus Hendrik Pierneef. In ‘Interview II’, landscape is not merely context but a psychological and political terrain, charged with questions of movement, legitimacy, and belonging.
The ambiguous relationship between the two seated figures invites reflection on the protocols of permission: who is allowed to leave, to stay, to belong. Their quiet tension and staged positioning suggest a performance of identity within inherited systems of control. One figure appears slightly translucent, her presence uncertain, as if caught between visibility and erasure. Through this work, Sunstrum continues her interrogation of border politics, not only in the geopolitical sense but also as a metaphor for the internal and external conditions that shape one's sense of self. Inflected with Afrofuturist sensibilities, ‘Interview’ II questions the authority of dominant historical narratives, positioning identity as both ancestral and speculative, always in flux.
