“I think of the figures in my work as time traveling,” says Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, “fantastical, alternate selves.” In an intriguing new series of works titled Diorama, the artist draws on the photography studio set up in Benin in the 1940s by Chief Solomon Osagie Alonge, who photographed Benin’s royal family and general public for sixty years. Referencing Renaissance painting, Alonge’s studio and her own fantasy world, Sunstrum’s paintings are hybrids of time, place and space, disorienting the viewer with visual clues to unravel. The series will be showing at Tiwani Contemporary from 11th January, 2019.
