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. Namoda’s work recently featured in When We See Us, a major travelling exhibition exploring a century of Pan-African figurative painting at Bozar, Brussels (2025); and in the Sharjah Biennale, Sharjah, UAE (2025). Other recent group exhibitions were held at Wellcome Collection, London (2024), and MoMu, Antwerp (2023). Recent solo exhibitions were held at the Cranford collection, London (2024); and the Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2024). In 2025, Namoda was the artist chosen for the window commission at Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK. She will have her first institutional solo exhibition in the US at ICA-VCU, Richmond, Virginia in 2026. In 2023, she was a resident at Thread Senegal — Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Sinthian, Senegal; and in 2025, she joined the residency at the NESR Foundation, Luanda, Angola. 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; Inhotim Museum, Brazil; and the Studio Museum, Harlem, NY, among others.