Go behind the scenes of It Will End In Tears by viewing 60 storyboard drawings at Goodman Gallery London through October, alongside paintings featured at the Barbican. Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, known for her transformative world-building, presents a unique collection inspired by her installation at The Barbican’s Curve Gallery.
These intricate works provide a glimpse into the artistic process behind Sunstrum’s first major solo exhibition at a UK institution.
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, known for her transformative world-building, presents a distinctive collection inspired by her installation at The Barbican’s Curve Gallery. These works provide insight into her first major solo exhibition at a UK institution.
The drawings, which serve as the conceptual groundwork for her installation, explore life in an imagined twentieth-century colonial outpost, loosely inspired by her grandmother’s hometown in Botswana.
A new character from Sunstrum’s expanding cast of alter-egos emerges, weaving together fragments of domestic life, bureaucracy, and travel motifs.
Featured Artworks
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Her work is enriched by crime fiction and film noir, which she uses to challenge archetypes like the femme fatale, while also drawing on her experiences across Africa, South Asia, and North America. Through these intimate drawings and immersive paintings, audiences can trace Sunstrum’s evolving narratives, reflecting themes of survival, longing, and the pursuit of home.
Together, these pieces offer a personal look at the process behind her Barbican installation, revealing the secrets behind its spectacle.
Artist Bio
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s (b. 1980, Mochudi, Botswana) work alludes to mythology, geology and theories on the nature of the universe. Her work includes imagery that reflects the diverse genealogies of her experience living in different parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, and the U.S. as well as ongoing research in ethnography, ecology, and quantum physics. The artist’s boundary-crossing practice centres Black female identity in the discourse of postcolonialism and neocolonialism, highlighting the contributions of overlooked historical figures while emphasising modes of knowledge and communication beyond the status quo.
In 2024, a major new solo exhibition opened at KM21 Den Haag, including a new large scale diptych painting within an installation that included items from the museum’s furniture collection. Sunstrum also presented her first solo exhibition titled ‘It Will End in Tears’, at a major UK institution, the Barbican Centre’s The Curve. Sunstrum took her life-size wood grain panoramas round the bend of the gallery, building a narrativised sequence with elements of film noir, crime fiction and pure drama.
Recent solo exhibitions include: 'It Will End In Tears,' Barbican London, UK (2024); 'You’ll be sorry,' Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (2023), 'The Pavillion,' London Mithraeum, Bloomberg SPACE, London (2023); 'All my seven faces,' Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati (2019); Michaelis School for the Arts at the University of Cape Town (2018); Interlochen Centre for the Arts, Interlochen (2016).
Group exhibitions and biennales include: 'Born in Flames: Feminist Futures,' The Bronx Museum of the Arts NY, USA (2021); 'WITNESS: Afro Perspectives' from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, El Espacio 23, Miami, USA (2020).
Collections include: Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, Hessel Museum at Bard College, New York, A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; University of Cape Town, Cape Town; Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt; El Espacio 23, Miami; FRAC des Pays de la Loire Contemporary Collection, Carquefou; University of South Africa (UNISA) Art Collection.
Sunstrum lives and works in The Hague, Netherlands.
