Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum

KM21 proudly presents artist Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s (b. 1980, Botswana) first solo museum show in Europe. The exhibition will include an overview of recent drawings and paintings that have never before been shown in the Netherlands. Sunstrum will also create a site-specific installation at KM21, based on two large new paintings which she will combine with historic items of furniture from Kunstmuseum Den Haag’s large decorative arts collection, in a unique interaction between contemporary art and cultural heritage. 

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s drawings, paintings, installations and animations allude to mythology, ethnology, ecology and quantum physics. Using influences from literature, cinema, theatre and other forms of storytelling, Sunstrum compiles an ever-expanding narrative. With her ghostly ‘cast’ of characters and alter egos, she explores unfathomable yet universal notions about being oneself and belonging. Sunstrum locates these characters in indefinable settings that feel both archaic and futuristic. 

Inspired by the art of landscape painting, from Dutch skies to the more geometric vistas of South African painter Jacobus Hendrik Pierneef (1886-1957), Sunstrum creates a patchwork of remembered landscapes from her childhood, which she spent in a number of countries, including Botswana, Canada, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Malawi and Panama. Her work overlaps to some extent with afrofuturism, in which artists and thinkers from the African diaspora depict a future beyond the framework of oppression, with elements of science fiction and fantasy. Sunstrum, too, questions whether ‘traditional’ history should simply be accepted as it is taught. As she puts it: ‘Our history is important, too. Identity is as much ancestral as it is futuristic, in this constant state of becoming.’

The title of the exhibition, The Gods and The Underdogs, comes from an essay by the influential South African writer Bessie Head (1937-1986). From 1964 onwards she lived in Botswana, having been issued an ‘exit permit’ which permitted her to leave South Africa but never to return, under the apartheid laws in force at the time. Exit Permit is also the title of Sunstrum’s new installation, which consists of two large paintings shown in a staged setting with items of furniture from Kunstmuseum Den Haag’s decorative arts collection. The setting, which recalls a waiting room, refers to the colonial  outposts that still exist in Botswana (and other countries) today: bureaucratic, makeshift headquarters where decisions about individual lives were taken.

The other drawings and paintings in the exhibition, many of which have never before been shown in Europe, also explore this history, from multiple perspectives. We see women in their Sunday best waiting on wooden benches, a parade of schoolgirls in uniform, ghostly ancestral apparitions, and extinct animals of the steppe. The layered works, full of colour, are both tender and defiant, intimate and monumental at the same time. Together, they raise urgent, topical questions about power relations, displacement, identity and autonomy, about gods and underdogs.

About the artist
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum lives and works in The Hague. She studied at the University of North Carolina and the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, USA. She recently had solo exhibitions at Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, Galerie Lelong in New York, CCA Cincinnati and Tiwani Contemporary in London. Her work has also been shown as part of group exhibitions at MOCA Toronto, The Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York, Nest in The Hague, Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town and WIELS in Brussels, and at the Sharjah Biennial 2023 and the Liverpool Biennial 2023.

The exhibition has been made possible by the Mondriaan Fund.