PAMELA PHATSIMO SUNSTRUM

Go behind-the-scenes of It Will End In Tears viewing online and in person, the 60 storyboard drawings at Goodman Gallery London through October. Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, known for her transformative approach to narrative world-building, presents a significant series of drawings made the preparation of her Curve Commission at The Barbican Gallery, London.

These detailed works on paper offer a window into the artistic process behind Sunstrum’s first major solo exhibition at a UK institution.

Rooted in her deep fascination with liminality, these drawings highlight Sunstrum’s ability to blur boundaries between reality and fiction, participation and spectatorship.

The drawings, which serve as the conceptual groundwork for her installation, reveal Sunstrum’s detailed exploration of everyday life in an imagined twentieth-century colonial outpost—a world loosely inspired by her grandmother’s hometown in Botswana. Through these pieces, viewers are introduced to a new character within Sunstrum’s ever-expanding cast of alter-egos, as she weaves together fragments of domestic life, bureaucratic structures, and travel motifs.

Rooted in her deep fascination with liminality, these drawings highlight Sunstrum’s ability to blur boundaries between reality and fiction, participation and spectatorship. Her work is enriched by influences from crime fiction and film noir, which she uses to challenge reductive archetypes like the femme fatale, while also drawing from her own experiences living across Africa, South Asia, and North America.

Through these intimate drawings, the journey to the Barbican exhibition is a reflective and immersive experience, inviting audiences to trace the artist’s creative process and the evolving narratives she builds.