Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum has cast you as an extra in a tense, hazy film about alienation, love and murder. She’s built a series of plywood film sets in the Barbican Curve, and filled them with rough, bare paintings, each one detailing a grim, uncomfortable narrative arc.
A woman arrives in some generic colonial outpost of wide open, empty landscapes and claustrophobic buildings. The sets recreate the outlines of a house, then a bedroom. In the paintings, awkward looks are exchanged, relationships are strained, washing is hung, a knife is brandished.
Lovers share a cigarette under the sheets, then a body is found on a porch. The final set is a courthouse, the paintings depict only white jurors.
All these riffs on film noir, femme fatales and murder mysteries tell a story of otherness, alienation and injustice. The implied narrative is full of anger and violence and jealousy in a colony watched over and controlled by an uncaring dominant culture.
The ideas are good, but the execution falls flat. The paintings are a bit shoddy and unfinished, and the sets are plain, dull plywood. It feels rushed, more like a sketch than the final thing, more like a storyboard than a full movie.
