Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: Parabellum

As in much of Sunstrum's multidisciplinary practice, the works comprising Parabellum draw inspiration from a wide range of references across fields—including film, literature, art, as well as her personal history. Engaging the tradition of academic painting as a vehicle for historic record, Sunstrum invokes and subverts the genre, interrogating mechanisms through which power is constructed. Her works are populated by a cast of women, prompting consideration of how information and control would be bartered in a gendered space, while offering glimpses into the multifaceted experiences of feminine friendship and camaraderie. In training and battlefield scenes, they form a united front; in depictions of laundering, grooming, and relaxation, tenderness blends with palpable tension as hierarchies between the women are implied. Sunstrum transforms the war painting into a meditation on intimacy, shifting its focus from heroism to the layered bonds of women in moments of both strength and vulnerability.

Extending the exhibition's unfurling narrative are a pair of arched paintings, each depicting dressing quarters at different moments in time, through which Sunstrum continues her explorations of sisterhood, domesticity, and visibility. Now you are everything (2025), reveals a room with a mirror, absent of figures and scattered with discarded clothes and pipes echoing those in other paintings on view. Seven pairs of shoes surround a table and chair. In a related composition entitled How do we know if we are loved? (2025), six figures surround a seventh as she contemplates her own naked reflection in the mirror, the group illuminating her with candles as she looks upon herself. The new paintings will be complemented by a selection of preparatory graphite drawings that lend insight into the artist's layered process and further develop the story told throughout the exhibition.

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