Pamela Phatsimo SunstrumTwo-seater, 2020
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s boundary-defying practice reimagines power and agency for Black subjectivity within systems that have historically dismissed its cultural and intellectual complexity. Her series of pencil and oil-on-wood panels are informed by a critical engagement with nineteenth century photographic portraiture and its role in advancing colonial narratives that diminished Black cultural contributions. In many of her works, Sunstrum overlays references to iconic American landscape painting with imagined, often primordial or post-apocalyptic environments. Her fantastical tableaux centre a diverse range of female figures who resist the passivity typically associated with the sitter. The ambiguity and fragmentation of the landscapes suggest overlapping cultural, historical, and ethnographic layers embedded within them.
‘Two Seater’ draws on a body of staged photographs the artist created in response to the history of popular studio portraiture in Africa and elsewhere. Sunstrum is particularly interested in how these constructed settings – including backdrops, props such as textiles, furniture, and plants, and the wearing of specific clothing – offered both photographers and their subjects the opportunity to invent a mythology around themselves. In this work, she deliberately complicates a singular reading by layering multiple temporalities, geographies, and visual references, inviting a sense of "analogue time travel" for the viewer.
