THE CURVE AT London’s Barbican Centre is as its name suggests, a curved space. When the Centre was built, the Curve was designed as a space to act as a sound barrier or buffer to contain the sounds emanating from the concert hall that it surrounds. Nowadays, it is used as a space for temporary exhibitions. Until the 5^th of January 2025, the Curve will contain an exhibition, “It will end in tears”, of paintings Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, who was born in Botswana in 1980.

Ms Sunstrum’s paintings are on grainy wooden panels, and are truly wonderfully executed. The series of paintings are all linked by a narrative – an imagined story of a woman who lands in a colonial country in Africa in the early to mid-20^th century, and has an adventure that ends up with a court case. For this exhibition, the Curve has been divided by wooden partitions into a series of rooms, connected to each other by an elevated walkway. Each room is designed to resemble a different stage set. For example. one is a kitchen. and another is a courtroom. The viewer walks along the walkway from room to room, seeing the series of paintings arranged in the order that the story unfolds. The heroine of the story is an imagined woman named Bettina. The artist created Bettina in her own image – each depiction of Bettina is the artist’s self-portrait. The resulting set of pictures along with the wooden partitions makes for an enjoyable and intriguing experience.

The paintings are like ‘stills’ from a movie. Although their style and subject matter is completely different, I was reminded of series of paintings such as those by Vittore Carpaccio (c1460-c1525) in Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni (in Venice), which show scenes from a legend with a Christian religious theme.

Ms Sunstrum’s site-specific exhibition at the Curve is what the series of guidebooks issued by the Michelin tyre company would describe as “vaut la détour” (‘worth the detour’).