Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum (Botswana 1980-)
Blood Fortune

pencil and acrylic on wood panel

Artwork date: 2019
Signature details: signed with the artist's name, date and title on the reverse
Exhibited: Contemporary Arts Centre, Cincinnati, 'All My Seven Faces', 12 July to 27 October 2019.
Exchange Rates*: USD 25 703,25 - 37 126,92
GBP 19 023,54 - 27 478,45
EURO 21 940,44 - 31 691,75

(1)

150 x 100 x 5 cm

Provenance:

Private collection, Idaho.

Gallery Momo, Johannesburg.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Born in Botswana and now practising in The Hague, Netherlands, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum constructs layered visual narratives that collapse linear time and place. Drawing across myth, memory, and speculative possibility, her multidisciplinary practice – which encompasses drawing, painting, installation and animation – foregrounds imagination as a radical tool for rethinking history and envisioning alternate futures.

The present work, Blood Fortune was, in 2019, included in All My Seven Faces, a landmark exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Centre in Cincinnati, and captures the artist’s interplay of temporalities with striking intensity. At its centre, a faceless woman stands in a hushed, shadowed interior, silhouetted against a backdrop of a world in upheaval. Beyond the palm fronds that frame her, helicopters hover in a smoke-hazed sky, suggesting chaos and conflict. These palms act as both a screen of protection and a veil through which history and memory collapse into a single view.

The figure herself embodies this same temporal layering. Cloaked in darkness yet adorned with luminous cascading beads and a crown of burnt-orange hair, her presence is at once regal and enigmatic; half-hidden, half-revealed. The figure’s anonymity allows her to become emblematic, less an individual than a vessel for many women, whose lives and histories bear the weight of witness, resilience and survival. Sunstrum consistently situates women as mythic agents and ‘superheroic figures’ within her work, staging scenes in which these women appear not only as subjects of history, but as active re-writers (architects of alternate worlds?).

In the current lot, the woman’s layered dress recalls ancestral eras, while within its folds appear spectral images: red figures caught in action behind bars, and the shimmer of moonlight on water. This merging of surface and embedded imagery speaks to Sunstrum’s technique of layering drawing and paint, allowing histories to surface like fragments of memory. Nearby, tied-back curtains and a table stacked with books add to the atmosphere of quiet observation, anchoring the scene between domesticity and epic narrative.

The title Blood Fortune deepens this sense of layered meaning. It recalls the concept of Bloodwealth, an indemnity paid to the family of a murder victim in certain African traditions, evoking the entanglement of violence, inheritance, and sacrifice across generations. In Sunstrum’s hands, such references are never literal but are instead woven into expansive, speculative narratives. Her practice resonates with Afrofuturism, a movement that reimagines histories and futures through the lens of African and diasporic experience, blending myth, science fiction, and cultural memory. Yet she brings to this field a distinctive emphasis on the radical possibilities of imagination as a revolutionary act.

Amy Carrington

COLLECTOR'S NOTE

• This work featured in All My Seven Faces in 2019 at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. This was the most comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to date, and was accompanied by her first monograph.

• This marks the first time a major painting by Sunstrum will be offered at auction in South Africa.

• Solo institutional shows include It Will End in Tears at The Curve, Barbican Centre in London in 2024; The Gods and the Underdogs at KM21 in The Hague in 2024; Networks of Care at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota in 2024; and The Pavillion at London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE in the UK in 2023.

• Major local and international exhibitions include You’ll be sorry at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg in 2023; Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: I Have Withheld Much More Than I Have Written at Galerie Lelong & Co., New York in 2022; and Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: Diorama, Tiwani Contemporary, London.

• Major international group exhibitions include To Protect These Fragile Things at Goodman Gallery, Cape Town in 2025; The Flesh of the Earth at Hauser & Wirth, New York in 2024; How Rest the Brave at Nest, The Hague in 2022; and Born in Flames: Feminist Futures at Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York in 2021.

• Art fairs and Biennales include Frieze New York, Art Basel, Cape Town Art Fair, the Liverpool Biennial and the Sharjah Art Biennale.

• Additional publication inclusions: Leaping Out: Landscape Becoming-Revolutionary, and the Yet-to-Be: In AFRICAN FUTURES, (ed. Sean O’Toole); and African Artists: 1882 to Now (Phaidon).

COLLECTIONS:

The artist is represented in numerous local and international collections, notably, Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt; FRAC des Pays de la Loire Contemporary Collection, Carquefou; University of South Africa (UNISA) Art Collection, Pretoria and Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town.