Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum

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.

Rooted in her fascination with liminality, these drawings and paintings highlight Sunstrum’s ability to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, participation and spectatorship. 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.

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.