Cassi Namoda

Cassi Namoda is a painter whose work interweaves the personal with the historical. Born in Maputo and having lived in several different countries throughout her life, Namoda’s nomadic lifestyle and multicultural identity has long informed her work. She originally studied cinema and considers narrative frameworks, storytelling and the presence of imagined characters to be significant elements in her visual practice. Reference images often serve as a starting point for her painting process: she is drawn to photographs that recall film-stills, images that echo ordinary yet profound moments of everyday life. Combining personal memories with archival references, she creates works that attempt to access emotional interiority and communicate human experience in all its subtlety. The duality between past and present, colonialism and post-colonialism, Africa and Europe, spiritual traditions and a globalised world is a latent force in her most recent paintings. An engagement with—and probing of—art history is a way of confronting the nuances inherent in conflicting ideologies and mutable identities. Her works include frequent references to modern art history, at once challenging and venerating the canon. She relates expressionism to emotional intensity, dissonant tones and figural distortions, while surrealism manifests itself through an embrace of magical realism or through themes borrowed from tribal art.

Cassi Namoda (b. 1988, Maputo, Mozambique) currently lives and works in Italy. Recent group exhibitions were held at Wellcome Collection, London (2024), and MoMu, Antwerp (2023). Recent solo exhibitions are on view at the Cranford collection, London (2024) and at the Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2024). Namoda’s work also features in When We See Us, a major travelling exhibition exploring a century of Pan-African figurative painting that opens at Bozar, Brussels, in spring 2025. In February 2025, Namoda is participating in the Sharjah Biennale, Sharjah, UAE. Namoda’s work is in the public collections at Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; MACAAL, Marrakesh; Long Museum, Shanghai; and the Studio Museum, Harlem, NY, among others. In 2023, she was a resident at Thread Senegal — Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Sinthian, Senegal; and in 2025, she will join the residency at the NESR Foundation, Luanda, Angola.