Measuring Inequality

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum was born in 1980 in Mochudi, Botswana. She grew up in different parts of Africa and southeast Asia before moving to the United States in 1998, earning a degree in international studies and transnational cultures from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2004. She then studied art at the Maryland Institute College of Art and worked as an artist-in-residence at the Baltimore Creative Alliance. Sunstrum currently lives and works between Johannesburg, South Africa, and Ontario, Canada, where she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Art & Art History at York University.

Motivated by her experiences in these diverse locales, Sunstrum explores how one’s sense of identity develops within geographic and cultural contexts. Her drawings – narrative landscapes that appear simultaneously futuristic and ancient – shift between representational and fantastical depictions of volcanic, subterranean, cosmological, and precipitous landscapes.

This piece, “The Mathematician”, nods to the 1960 portrait of Madame Ogiugo, a Nigerian woman whose photograph was taken by Chief Solomon Osagie Alonge. Through the piece, Sunstrum “wanted to suggest that vernacular knowledge, which is known in a nonquantifiable way in our bodies and our traditions, should not be regulated lower on the hierarchy of knowledge.”