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.