Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum

You'll be sorry , 2023

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s work draws on mythology, geology, and theories of the universe to explore expansive questions around time, identity, and belonging. Her painting practice brings together layered landscapes and recurring figures that exist between ancient worlds and speculative futures. Informed by her lived experience across Africa, South Asia, and North America, Sunstrum engages with ideas of hybridity, memory, and displacement. Her compositions juxtapose narrative and abstraction, using symbolic references, shifting perspectives, and temporal dislocations to reflect on how identity is shaped through movement and inherited histories.

‘You'll be sorry’ forms part of Sunstrum’s recent body of work centred on a fictional femme fatale figure, reimagined as a symbol of precarity, suspicion, and the defiance that accompanies return and reclamation. Through her subjects, Sunstrum challenges the archetype of the femme fatale, which has historically relied on reductive and often misogynistic portrayals of women across literature, cinema, and visual art. The figures become a device for interrogating border politics – both in the geopolitical sense and in the more intimate, psychological experience of feeling on the edge of belonging.