Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s ‘It Will End in Tears’ weaves a narrative of identity, homecoming, and resistance, blending personal history with cinematic elements and minimalist set designs, as explored in this feature by Vamika Sinha.
‘Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: It Will End in Tears’ installation view at Barbican Art Gallery. 19 September 2024 – 5 January 2025. © Jo Underhill / Barbican
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum is the latest artist to fill Barbican’s Curve Gallery in London, a smooth crescent-shaped space that guides visitors as if down the slope of a large ear. ‘It Will End in Tears’ is the Botswana-born, Netherlands-based artist’s first solo exhibition at a major UK institution, running until 5 January 2025. The artist takes 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.
Inspired by the Barbican itself as an institution renowned also for its cinema, music and theatre, Sunstrum has collaborated with Remco Osório Lobato to transform the space into a series of minimalist, skeletal “film sets”. Wooden interior spaces, walkways, ramps, stairs, waiting areas and more form the show’s literal world-building, always making sure, however, that their construction and artifice is as clear as the reality they are designed to mimic. The sets further help the artworks’ narrative unfold like a screenplay. Their wood mingles with that of the panels, to imply that visitors are entering a specific, intact, yet fictionalised world with its own rules and logics – but that our presence in this world is, precisely, to question them.
‘Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: It Will End in Tears’ installation view at Barbican Art Gallery. 19 September 2024 – 5 January 2025. © Jo Underhill / Barbican
The story begins with a presumably Motswana woman returning home after some time overseas; home is a mid-twentieth century colonial outpost in rural Botswana, a space the artist has roughly based on her grandmother’s hometown. Immediately, the trope of a foreign returnee character evokes a long canon of similar stories. I thought of the admired 1966 postcolonial novel Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, whose story too begins with its unnamed narrator’s return to Sudan after a long period studying in England, and dealing with the resulting struggles of reckoning with his newfound foreignness. Here, we see Sunstrum’s protagonist Bettina – her name referencing South African-born writer Bessie Head, who famously became a Motswana citizen – return to a home that has become both familiar and alien. Dressed in a fur coat, cloche hat, smart heels and bags in hand, Bettina appears to be walking onto a path of no return now, her back forebodingly to the viewer as she strides into an old-new life.
Bettina is Sunstrum’s second alter ego. The artist herself was born in Mochudi but spent time living in other parts of Africa, southeast Asia and the United States. These locations have palimpsested not only in Sunstrum but also the women populating her work. The artist has stated that one motivation for this exhibition is subverting some of the misogyny of the femme fatale trope found in film noirs, with Hitchcock as an influence. Early in the show, the panels show Bettina adjusting to the more cramped domesticity and traditional gender roles of her new setting, wearing dowdy floral dresses in the kitchen and wiping cups by the sink. But there is an edge to each of these scenes, a sharp, growing sense of unease and malcontent – an anonymous man in a shirt and tie appears in the background, Bettina’s face becoming harder and more mask-like as she carries out various chores. In one panel, we do not see her face, just the bottom half of a woman’s figure walking through a door – with a knife in her hand.
Sunstrum’s intention may be to explore that dangerous precipice of when a woman finds herself multiply constrained, beginning to simmer with a quiet, galvanising rage. But the panels, unfortunately, remain more frustratingly ambiguous about this than not. All of the time we are also reminded of our own voyeurism, peering at this woman’s personal space and interiority through Sunstrum’s “windows” in her constructed sets.
‘Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: It Will End in Tears’ installation view at Barbican Art Gallery. 19 September 2024 – 5 January 2025. © Jo Underhill / Barbican
The key to it all could be in a tableau in which there are seemingly two Bettinas – though one cannot be sure of this either. The two female figures are dressed identically, backs to each other. The panel, like all the others, is gridded and the lines vivisect the two women as if they are being split by a mirror. Perhaps the split is a metaphor for time and place; each woman could be facing a different temporality. One knocks on the door of the past, the other reflects on the future or alternative life, in which the cigarette she’s smoking could symbolise her liberation from both colonial and patriarchal rules. These two Bettinas perhaps connote a split in her psyche, similar to Salih’s narrator’s, as she tries to reconcile two conflicting narratives within her body.
Is this a kind of psychological descent for Bettina? Or a passing fantasy of violence, a form of mental resistance, that leads an ordinary woman to become a “femme fatale” in the first place? If the exhibition title is anything to go by, an ominous end awaits. The next act reveals Bettina in a more typically femme fatale getup – evening dress, gloves, jewellery. She seduces a man. There are domestic scenes of her with (the same?) man, a pensive yet calculating expression playing across her features. We see a couple tenderly wrapped up in each other under the blankets, the woman placing a cigarette in the man’s mouth – very Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Le Lit. The tone continues to thrum with an underlying darkness. The cigarette feels more like a smoking gun than a tenderness.
‘Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: It Will End in Tears’ installation view at Barbican Art Gallery. 19 September 2024 – 5 January 2025. © Jo Underhill / Barbican
Murder is the climax, and a fur-coated, high-heeled woman stands at the crime scene, a gun in her hand. And so the show manufactures a need to return and comb over it again, to play a game of whodunnit. This mystery is at times overpowering, pulling attention away from the artworks towards a foggy session of detective work. Yet the mystery feels loosely assembled. With the absence of wall labels entirely, one really only has the initial wall text as any kind of reference. This may be part of the point – though if it is, it is too uncertain and confusing.
The exhibition’s final set thrillingly reveals a courtroom and Sunstrum paints the court’s spectators and the jury, all of whom are white and presumably British. At this tense, climactic point in Bettina’s trajectory, someone else, apparently, will again decide what she will be able to do next. This final space, so airy and free in contrast to the binding judgments and suffocations of a court, reminds me of the 2022 Alice Diop-directed French legal drama Saint Omer. There, too, a woman is put on trial for a crime, which also becomes a trial of her womanhood and her belonging in a place.
It’s all a brilliant, subversive storyboard for an exhibition, carried out with playful panache by a Motswana female artist in an old Brutalist institution that has long been a pinnacle of Western cultural success. But down to the pencilled-looking paintings, ‘It Will End in Tears’ still carries the slight feel of an unfinished draft. I left the show feeling faintly rejected. I myself grew up in Botswana and left it, travelling to many places and pausing for now, it seems, in London. At a point, I had begun seeing a version of myself in Bettina; by the end of the curve, I still did not know whether she was free.
Vamika Sinha is an Indian-born, Botswana-raised arts writer living in London. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from SOAS University of London and is interested in entwinements of postcoloniality, cosmopolitanism and feminism. More on her website vamikasinha.com
