Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum It Will End in Tears

What does it mean to be cast as a juror in a trial that has already taken place, whose verdict has already been delivered? In Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s first UK solo exhibition, the title spoils the ending. It will end in tears: a statement of rigid finality.

“It Will End in Tears” unfolds in frag­ments. In the Barbican’s The Curve gallery, Sunstrum, who is based in The Hague, presents a series of film noir vignet­tes rendered large-scale in oil and pencil on wood. Each work — titled non-sequen­tially as, for example, Scene 7 or Scene 58 — comp­rises a grid of panels that never entirely connect, like photo­graphs ripped apart in a moment of melo­drama and stitched back together in fugitive remorse. The narrative follows a loose three-act structure, reminis­cent of Hitch­cock’s Rear Window, which was screened by Sunstrum as part of the exhibition’s progra­ming and echoes in the exhibition’s ubiquitous windows, obstacles and thres­holds. The first act depicts moments of orientation and proces­sing, as Bettina — Sunstrum’s prota­gonist and lookalike — arrives at a colonial outpost in Botswana, the surrogate authority of a far-away govern­ment. In the second act, the scenes shift to a domestic space simme­ring with tension, leading to a moment of violence that anchors the final act: a court­room drama surroun­ding a murder trial.

Each of the acts is animated by a series of faux film sets created by the artist Remco Osório Lobato and organized as a kind of scaf­folding upon which Sunstrum’s evidence is mounted. These sets often use partial or minimal struc­tural ele­ments to suggest provi­sional or floating spaces — verandas, check­points — not entirely an­chored in reality. Truth is literally fabri­cated through these fragile, tempo­rary stages; a world poised between verifia­bility and dece­ption, where the boun­daries of reality are splin­tered and porous. The viewer’s position within the scene is delibe­rately ambi­guous and seems to oscillate between different roles often in tension with one another: spectator and voyeur, who witnesses moments of private conflict or tender affection; partici­pant and actor, such as the bystan­ders to a crime in Scene 45 or the private investi­gator in Scene 58; or juror and colonial bureau­crat, ever more complicit in the admini­strative and institu­tional mecha­nisms that control the charac­ters’ fates with every step. Barriers appear in each painting too, from the outpost’s fencing in Scene 7 to the marble balus­trades in Scene 10. These multiple positions, and the many thres­holds we must cross, alert us to the domi­nance of control and contain­ment within the narrative all pointing to an unseen, unspoken and possibly unspea­kable violence. Every scene, like a film still captured before “Action!”, seems suspen­ded in a moment of unreali­zable potential, held hostage by the quiet threat of its own actuali­zation. It feels as though the viewer’s incursion—some­where between inno­cence and complicity, restric­tion and invita­tion—may in fact pull the trigger.

The Barbican itself is impli­cated by Sunstrum, too, but per­haps not suffi­ciently, in what seems like a missed oppor­tunity. Occu­pying the site of Roman London’s main fort, the modern-day complex echoes the ancient barbican—an outpost or walled city — with towering apart­ments, like sentinels, laid out in an impene­trable pattern of moats and jetties, its residents visible yet unreach­able. Upon disco­vering the architec­tural purpose of The Curve — a sound barrier to buffer the neigh­boring concert hall — Sunstrum “became fasci­nated by this liminal zone: a space that encases not only the spectacle, but also the secrets of [its] tricks and devices.” While liminality is cons­picuous within the painted scenes them­selves, the linearity and unmis­takable start and end­points of the painted narra­tive, within the gallery’s broken circle, impairs a more structural, perhaps more pervasive represen­tation of stasis. Bettina’s arrival at the outpost marks a clear start, and the court trial anchors its conclusion, com­muni­cating a legal frame­work of finality, in which disputes must eventually reach a resolution. Nothing can remain suspended forever, it will end.

Although there are digres­sions and blanks in the narrative, its arc is as unyiel­ding as the curved gallery walls that propel one scene breath­lessly into the next. Perhaps the storytelling could be more imperfect, more fractured and so more self-reflexive, cons­ciously under­mining the femme fatale trope and the co-opted noir aesthetic by drawing atten­tion to its own falli­bility. Would it be more effective perhaps to further confuse the order of the frag­ments, to scatter the vignettes? And what if one panel were removed from each painting, or exchanged for a panel in another? A dialogue might become a mono­logue; a departure turns into an arrival. Yet, the dominant narrative's assured linearity is vital so that Sunstrum can construct an inten­tionally unassured, wobbly and ambi­guous counter-narrative. Working back­wards with this in mind, the paintings — whittled down from 60 story­board draw­ings made by Sunstrum — become discer­nible through another lens: an unreliable deposition presen­ted to a biased jury. The charac­ters’ emotions are betrayed not by the pastiche noir of their expres­sions, but in the knots and undula­tions of the wood’s grain below. Sunstrum’s narrative, like The Curve’s function, is a kind of stifling, a suppres­sion. She astutely noted that “even squee­zed between two barriers, history still persists.” Perhaps, like a noise emana­ting from two pursed lips, history is intensi­fied by its suppres­sion. History persists, cruel, relent­less and immi­nent, as steadily assured as the black saloon in Scene 7, traver­sing the barren horizon midway through this cautio­nary tale which, in turn, fore­sha­dows the convoy of police cars slicing through the driving rain in pursuit of their presu­med culprit at its climax. Pain awaits — in fact it already throbs.

Recounting his move from Jamaica to Britain in the early 1950s — the former, at that moment, poised to move towards self-govern­ment and indepen­dence — Stuart Hall described his life as “sharply divided into two unequal, entan­gled halves. You could say I have lived…on the hinge.”¹ Hall reflects on his child­hood expe­riences amidst anti-colonial tumult as a “slow disen­tangling of threads, a process of disen­chant­ment and disaf­filiation […] an unpleasant expe­rience, replete with gaps, contra­dictions, evasive silences, guilt and rage.” The hinge seems an apt signifier for “It Will End in Tears”. In its second act, opening inside a home built in Osório Lobato’s material short­hand, sparse “ghost props” blend into the wood: a drained sink and unused writing bureau offer hollowed-out symbols of domes­ticity, items one might jettison when moving house. Gazing through the kitchen window above the sink, one encoun­ters Sunstrum’s most vivid pain­ting, Scene 19, where, spied through a fore­ground of verdant, tangled foliage, a woman hangs washing on a line. In Scene 10, directly to the left, a man with cap in hand approa­ches a woman at a busy dinner party with a romantic propo­sition. To see both works more closely, one must step off the wooden flotilla into an anxious inter­space, a portal—perhaps the “gap” that Hall described — as if no longer atop a raft but floating beneath it. Like Sunstrum’s pain­tings, Osório Lobato’s dioramas are not always seamless, produ­cing ruptures in these absences and, ironically, powerful moments when their supports momen­tarily disappear. This feeling of unte­thered-ness between the instal­lation adds another layer of fiction. Scene 19 and Scene 10, taken as a diptych, signifies an unquen­chable desire: the idyll of domes­ticity within an Edenic garden — perhaps the false utopia of return to an imagi­ned home­land — and the flickering ache of unful­filled romance. The “slow disen­tangling of threads”.

Eventually, The Curve becomes a pipeline in which everything — the flotilla, the jetti­soned objects — is pulled towards a familiar denoue­ment. The viewer is pro­cessed once again and enters the towering court­room of the final set. Two paintings display an all-white jury presiding over the case and a sinking feeling swells. What does it mean to be cast as a juror in a trial that has already taken place, whose verdict has already been deli­vered? Maybe fittingly, but disap­poin­tingly none­theless, the exhi­bition strug­gles to extricate itself from the tropes it refe­rences. But this disap­point­ment and inevita­bility almost becomes its praxis. “A choice of pains. That's what living was all about,” wrote Audre Lorde, when reflec­ting upon her abortion in Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name.² There’s disap­point­ment in knowing that the path is set, deviation impossible. Disap­point­ment in woman­hood, in how choices, cons­trained by circum­stance, often lead to preor­dained end­points. Sunstrum presents a final painting as an epilogue: an arched bridge carries two figures towards one another over waters that flow along the wood’s grain. It seems to offer reso­lution yet, like the mirror as a noir motif of deceit, the bridge’s reflec­tion in the water below reveals its own quiet fallacy.

1. Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: Life Between Two Islands, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018, 11.
2. Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Watertown, M.A.: Persephone Press, 1982, 111.