Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s Animations and Paintings Create a Mystical Pantheon

In an ancient underground temple below the heart of London’s financial district, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum has built a mystical pantheon—a wooden structure housing an arcade of five animations from the artist’s archive. Each film explores origin stories, using the narrative archetype of the hero’s quest. Titled “The Pavilion,” the artist’s first U.K. solo exhibition is open from July 27, 2023, through January 13, 2024, at the London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE.

The London Mithraeum, now an archeological site, was once a temple for a cabalistic Roman cult to the god Mithras. The site’s spiritual history, now preserved in archeological artifacts, sets the tone for Sunstrum’s artworks and her persistent inquiry into the genesis of our earthly existence.

Though Sunstrum, 43, has always moved freely between animation, installation, drawing, painting, and performance, all of her works can be viewed as part of the same ongoing saga, in which familiar motifs and a phalanx of female characters—such as the artist’s alter ego, Asme—recur. Each work, Sunstrum suggested in an interview, is a fragment in pursuit of the same theme: “How history is written and implicates power, and how it affects national and cosmic, as well as personal stories.”

In the animation Spin (2013), for instance, Sunstrum appropriates images from Eadweard Muybridge’s motion-study photograph series as part of a fantastical origin story for the sky and earth. In Polyhedra (2016), meanwhile, she looks into the earth’s molten center—with references to early 20th-century photographs of volcanoes by Tempest Anderson, a British surgeon who traveled the world to photograph eruptions and their aftermaths.

Like these photographic pioneers, Sunstrum, too, studies the world and its structures through images. Her exploratory, iterative approach initially was the result of “not necessarily sticking to one medium,” seeing her studio practice instead as a research space. As an undergraduate at the University of California, she said, “Drawing wasn’t something that came easily to me—I found it really hard to represent figures in this language. It was always a struggle.” She turned to collage as a solution. “It had this wonderful urgency. I could quickly splice this vision together.”

From her early collage works, which used anthropological textbooks, glossy geographic magazines, and “coffee-table books that took you on these strange ethnographic journeys,” she began to make hand-cut animations such as A Short History: Starring Asme as Herself (2007). She said she was inspired by the work of Eva Hesse, Kiki Smith, and Louise Bourgeois, and “thinking about ideas of selfhood…how it might be something that shifts, explodes or implodes, and separates to come back together through time and across space.” The film’s rough aesthetic is the result of hand-cutting each photograph and animating frame by frame. Although she did this initially because she “didn’t know any better,” now that she’s mastered digital technologies, Phatsimo Sunstrum continues to insist on “working in a ‘dumb’ way, touching each frame by hand—it conveys something about touch, residue, and time.”

Sunstrum’s life experiences have also informed this distinctive patchwork aesthetic, also seen in her recent oil and pencil paintings with their tapestry-like surfaces; as a child, her family moved often, from Botswana to Canada, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Malawi, and Panama. “Certainly the way I grew up, moving so much and finding ourselves as family against so many political and cultural backgrounds—trying to make sense of yourself against that constantly changing backdrop, you develop a position of an observer looking around to find signals of what you find to be true about the world,” Sunstrum said.

In 2010, after completing her BA at the University of North Carolina and an MFA at Maryland Institute College of Art, Sunstrum began a residency at the acclaimed Bag Factory in Johannesburg, whose alumni include prominent South African artists such as David Koloane, Sam Nhlengethwa, Tracey Rose, and Bronwyn Katz. It was a time, she recalls, when international interest in African artists working on the continent was on the rise. She was offered a solo exhibition in London at Tiwani Contemporary in 2016, and in 2020, she joined Goodman Gallery; a solo exhibition, “You’ll Be Sorry,” will open at the gallery’s Johannesburg space in October. (The artist is also represented by Galerie Lelong & Co.)

Liza Ezzers, Goodman Gallery’s owner and director, remembered meeting Sunstrum when she was in residence at the Bag Factory, and being struck by her “compelling storytelling techniques” and the way her work “speaks to significant global conversions including migration and histories of colonialism.”