Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum in the Liverpool Biennial 2023, uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, is pleased to announce that Mumbo Jumbo and The Committee (2022) by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum is currently on view at the Tate Liverpool as part of the of the Liverpool Biennial.

Titled uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things, the 12th edition of the Liverpool Biennial addresses the history and temperament of the city of Liverpool and is a call for ancestral and indigenous forms of knowledge, wisdom and healing. In the isiZulu language, ‘uMoya’ means spirit, breath, air, climate and wind. In the works on view at Tate Liverpool, artists act as cartographers, redrawing the lines of past catastrophes to create new possibilities. The exhibition traces a thread that connects catastrophe to ongoing healing; from wound to repair, from tragedy to joy. The artists explore ways to connect ancestral knowledge, with the present. They consider how we might acknowledge and heal traumas of the past and the echoes that persist, carried by the wind.

In Mumbo Jumbo and The Committee (2022), Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum explores the conflicting demands faced by the artist in pursuit of home and wholeness – the intrinsic expectations of family and community, with the demands and limitations imposed by whiteness. Through drawing, animation and bespoke furnishing inspired by Victorian design aesthetics, Sunstrum looks at how our cultural identities are often tied to our environments, to the expectations of others and imposing systems of class and race inequality.

Liverpool Biennial 2023 is curated by Khaniyisile Mbongwa.

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