Pamela Phatsimo SunstrumExit Permit (diptych), 2024
For some time Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum has used an ever growing cast of characters to unfold a narrative that spans multiple geographical, historical, and cultural identifiers. Earliest works revolve around cosmic origin stories, ancestral archives, and the mythical hero’s quest. These beginnings then led Sunstrum to explore the identity of this hero within scientific theories on the origins and structure of the universe alongside speculative fiction and the political possibilities in imagining the future. The hero in Sunstrum’s work stands for multiplicity, nuance, and hybridity– Sunstrum’s hero is a chimerical time-and-space traveller, and thus a Deleuzean ‘radical’ whose constant state of ‘becoming’ disrupts the unidirectional and fundamentalist concerns of colonialism, capitalism, and other projects of empire building. More recently Sunstrum has explored the aesthetics of oppression and has been curious about the use of space, design, and materials to impose and coerce. For instance, recent installations such as ‘Mumbo Jumbo and The Committee’ (2022) and ‘The Pavilion’ (2023) included allusions to Victorian furniture and design. Now, two decades into the spinning of this saga, the hero in Sunstrum’s work has again time-travelled to a mid-century moment in a rural colonial outpost. Against the backdrop of a small bordertown village, this new diptych painting, ‘Exit Permit’ is a poetic amplification of the inner turmoil presented by such crossing points. In the exhibition at KM21 (Den Haag) the work is presented as a dramatic tableau: a drawing installation composed across multiple sheets of linen set among a ‘cast of characters’ made up of several pieces of furniture borrowed from the Kunstmuseum’s applied arts collections. These posed pieces of furniture become extensions of the narrative composition within Sunstrum’s painted work.
