Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s The Pavilion

By Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou.

Smoke rises high against the red earthen walls, whispers turn to chants grown loud. The scent of anticipation lingers in the air, as a throng of worshippers gather close. They have come to make a vow, a prayer, an offering to a god no more visible than the walls within which they stand. They have come, many men united as one, to hold aloft their cups to the spillage of blood.

This is the experience on offer at the London Mithraeum, the ruins of a Roman temple dating back to the ancient city of Londinium. Found in the bowels of the now financial centre of our capital, the Mithraeum is an archaeological site bearing witness to the Greco-Roman worship of Mithras, a god who was once celebrated for being born from a rock, slaughtering a bull and banqueting with Sol, the sun deity. Belonging to both Roman and Zoroastrian religions, the cult of Mithras spread across the Roman Empire but eventually ended with the rise of early Christianity. Abandoned in the fifth century AD, the London temple became buried under layers of sediment and the fortifications of future generations. Housed today beneath the Bloomberg space, this ancient topos of the most mysterious, male-only worship has been demystified and its foundations laid bare for all to see.

What remains unknown to us, however, is the exact belief system held by Mithras’ followers. Did they worship him because of his triumph over the bull, a Greco-Roman symbol of divinity taming nature, man ruling beast, civilisation superseding a “savage” era? Was it because of his connection and similarity to Sol, the god of poetry, light and culture? Or did his significance lie in war, justice and loyalty, as it did for other Western regions and Middle Eastern nations? Indistinct in meaning and practise, Mithras remains a mythical mystery but one no less compelling to the mythos of London today.

It is into this obscurity — over past rituals, events, knowledge systems and the mythologies subsequently built around them — that Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s installation, The Pavilion, speaks. Housed in the Bloomberg Space, directly above the subterranean Mithraeum, The Pavilion is its own equally esoteric though no less sacred temple. Designed in collaboration with Remco Osório Lobato, Sunstum’s wooden structure is ‘reminiscent of Victorian cabinets of curiosities’, whilst its ‘interrelated viewing booths’ contain an archive of the artist’s own animations. Moving through the noun and verb sense of ‘pavilion’, Sunstrum’s work is both a ‘dwelling place’, ‘shelter’ and ‘ornamental building’, as well as a structure that ‘conceals’, ‘encamps’ and ‘encloses’ into itself various histories, stories, epistemologies, cosmogonies and theogonies. Yet rather than recapture and recapitulate the legend of Mithras, together with its iconography and mythemes, Sunstrum interrogates the museological and archival practises that attempt to bring past cultures, peoples and cults to light. By combining the old — Victorian cabinetry and the archaeological findings one finds within them — with the new — poetic montage-like videos — Sunstrum challenges the stories these spaces seek to tell and embody. Through this innovative and self-reflexive amalgam of old and new technologies, she plots new directions and puts forward new interpretations from which museums and the myths they hold can be read. The Pavilion, therefore, offers a new position from which to invoke mythologies of the past whilst reinventing them.

This simultaneous reinvention and interrogation of museological myths is ingrained into the very fabric of The Pavilion. Despite being billed as a cabinet of curiosities, The Pavilion takes its leave of the wunderkammer of seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century private aristocratic collectors (from which most European museums stem), and looks, instead, to later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century spaces and archives, like the now public institutions of, say, the Mütter through to the British Museum. Such private collections, the founding of which was based ostensibly on furthering naturalistic and medical research, were underpinned by dubious networks of exchange, colonial exploits and problematic taxonomies and curatorial practises. Embodied in the mahogany casing, with its viewing booths, niches and recesses, is Sunstrum’s critique of the origins of the cabinet-cum-museum and its often violent and unethical history. Its five-channelled videos, installed at alternate heights and depths of the structure merely serve to accentuate this critical foray into past and present modes of history-making. What is more, Sunstrum’s work is positioned directly opposite vitrines containing roman artefacts (like amulets, pots, pins and brooches) found during the excavation of the Mithraeum. Spatially and structurally, The Pavilion questions the delivery of the past when it is presented as hard cold ‘fact’ behind the curatorial glass. When witnessed through a vitrified casing, does our mythologizing, our historizing, crystallise into one vision and refrain? And what, more importantly, is lost to this act, to this cramping and narrowing of imagining and retelling of whatever came before, well, us.

Behind the structure, Sunstrum probes such issues further by incorporating seats to ‘contemplate’ all that The Pavilion and its ancient surroundings entail. In doing this, we, the viewers, become part of the contemplation, or rather interrogation, of cultures of collecting and collections of mythicized histories. Our bodies (as much as our minds), encased in the installation, probe the imageries Sunstrum’s animations unfold, thereby making us part of the mythologising and demythologising process. We, too, are contributors in the narratives institutions weave around historical sites, acts, remains and the lost ways of living attributed to them. We embody these institutions and the myths they perpetuate as much as they supposedly embody and house the evolution of ‘us’. Seated in the alcove, beneath a constellation emblazoned in gold, Sunstrum demonstrates how the individual is part of the whole, and the human is simultaneously within, amongst and of the wider cosmogony(s).

But it is her videos that take us on this deeper, though no less obscure, journey into the myths of our own place in the wider universe. It is her animations that continue to frame the personal in the mythicisation and institutionalisation of history. In A Short History Starring Asme as Herself (2007), the first animation viewed in a recess of the cabinet, Sunstrum is tripled before our very eyes. Walking into an open field, Sunstrum as her mythical alter ego, Asme, is first joined by another Asme-like character sans jumper and then finally a bare-chested version. The three stand creating their own patch of green calm and exchange glances, only for the two clothed Asmes to ingest a cloudy stream from the semi-clad one. This interpersonal exchange beautifully captures alternate systems of knowing, the intergenerational legacies of our own past, which often occur and go unrecognised by archival and museological spaces. In this act of reunion, reconnection and imbibement, Sunstrum demonstrates the importance of the personal to the creation of histories.

In fact, Asme becomes a node through which the history of Sunstrum’s own work can be charted, reclaimed, archived into the monument that is The Pavilion. We are our own mythologies, Sunstrum implies, our own orientation points and constellations from which to navigate these diverse knowledge systems and beliefs within the chaos of the cosmos. Far from fulfilling a god-like role akin to Mithras, Asme, as a fictional figure, a form moving through the landscape of Sunstrum’s own mythical landscape, demonstrates how such fictions are more real and integral than any other empirical finding and established epistemic frame of reference. By placing this character in the fabric of her installation, Sunstrum shows how chronicles of the past truly are the stuff of dreams and the imagination.

What really returns us to the smoky esotericism of Mithras and its recovered place in the history of London’s capital is Sunstrum’s insistence on female-led and female-centred narratives. The Mithraeum was a site founded and frequented by men only, in honour of a male god whose acts spoke to and of masculinist deeds of prowess, strength, dominance and fortune. The presence and influence of women is scarce (even Mithras’ birth omits a maternal figure or force), therefore, in the Mithraeum, if not completely absent. Although the site and exhibition space is now supervised, managed and curated by a woman-led team, the origins of Mithraeums, much like those of the museum or gallery spaces erected around them, are male, bespeaking of hegemonic homosocial cultures and powers. The Pavilion playfully undercuts this masculinist, patriarchal (and macho?) mode; it challenges the exclusionary spaces — both sacred and institutionally secular — of the past by bringing in femino-centric myths in video form. Sunstrum creates a veritable mini-museum of feminised figures who traverse times and spaces, demonstrating their primordial power but also their role in the other Greco-Roman mythologies that have come down to us.

In this light, video works like Spin (2011) and Polyhedra (2016), recuperate and repurpose female mythical figures to challenge this glaring omission in the history of the site. As a bird transmogrifies into a moon into a solar eclipse into an astrological wheel of time (and eventually to a roaming bull), Sunstrum catapults us back — or forwards? — in time to a remote and forested backdrop where a woman spools water from a tub with a bucket. We are then transported to a starry expanse, a dazzling galaxy where the woman replicates into not two or three, as was the case with A Short History, but seven identical figures. What Sunstrum is referencing here is the myth of the Danaids, where King Danaos’ daughters went in search of water on behalf of their father and were eventually married off to the sons of Aigyptos. In some variants, most of the daughters kill their husbands and are subsequently condemned to carry water in leaky vessels for eternity; in others, the women are purified by Hermes and Athene. In Spin, the women bejewel the cosmos with their travails, unceasingly pouring water in a counterpoint formation; these repetitive actions, the rituals in which they are mechanically engaged, return us not to the punitive patriarchal narrative they belong to, but to the issue of sacrifice at the heart of cultures and cults. Mithras’ sacrifice of the bull, the women sacrificed to their father’s commands and kingdom, the sacrifices inherent to the passage of time and its commemoration, again, in sites and spaces such as the Mithraeum.

Polyhedra, also, blurs mythic temporalities and geographies by flitting between watery, cavernous and volcanic landscapes and barren terrains, to a figure — perhaps Asme again? — holding a bowl consisting of glittering fragments and cosmological scraps. Our place in this, as Sunstrum signifies repeatedly, is with the stars, the shining though once crude forces that are aloft but always, inevitably, fall back to the earth. Another film, The Star, The Moon (2011), takes this and Spin further in seeing Asme-Sunstrum paddling through a world at once ancient and futuristic, alien and strangely familiar. Since the basin is a reference to those spied in Spin, Sunstrum-Asme becomes another kind of mythical woman, navigating the perils of this extra-terrestrial environment, no longer condemned to pour forth water or be a sacrifice in the mythos of patriarchal times and climes. Instead she is a wayfarer, a traveller, a navigator of her own world, which may be flooded or afloat but continues to shine around her sailing, exploratory form.

Sunstrum’s videos may divert our attention away from the Mithraeum and what it meant for Roman Londoners in 240AD. But the videos do invite us to consider what the site — indeed, what all archaeological landmarks and institutionalised monuments to past civilisations mean for us today. As we move around The Pavilion, as we move around the Mithraeum, we consider the losses and gains involved in delivering us to this moment; we comprehend the sacrifices integral to our stories, to the myths of yore both reposited in and recounted around museological and archival spaces. And we contemplate our part in it all, our lot and vesseled contribution, the sacrifices we are willing to make and be part of in the telling of our tales.

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s The Pavilion is at London Mithraeum Bloomberg Space until 20th January 2024.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou is a writer, the founding editor-in-chief and general arts editor of Lucy Writers, and is currently writing up her PhD in English Literature (and Visual Material Culture) at UCL. She regularly writes on visual art, dance and literature for magazines such as The London Magazine, The Arts Desk, The White Review, Plinth UK, Burlington Contemporary, review 31, Club des Femmes, The Asymptote Journal, The Double Negative and many others. From 2022-2023, Hannah will be managing an Arts Council England-funded project for emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds, entitled What the Water Gave Us, in collaboration with The Ruppin Agency and Writers’ Studio. She is also working on a hybrid work of creative non-fiction about women artists and drawing, an extract from which is published in Prototype’s upcoming anthology, Prototype 5.
Twitter: @hhgsparkles
Instagram: @hannahhg25