Cassi Namoda in conversation with Diana Campbell
Filmed in Brussels, the artist discusses her exhibition Tropical Depression.
This video was made in accordance with the exhibition Tropical Depression at Xavier Hufkens. For Namoda’s generation, the colonial past is something that can only be accessed through words, testimonies and images. And yet its impact is immense and all pervasive. This duality — between past and present, colonialism and post-colonialism, Africa and Europe, spiritual traditions and a globalised world — is a latent force in her latest works, which not only seek out visual metaphors for this turbulent period in Mozambican history but also a means of articulating and processing its legacy.
Cassi Namoda: “This is also a show about relational trauma. There is a lot of engagement with a sort of discomfort in the human body language. That was something I was exploring through lapses of time and colour as an emotional embodiment.”
Diana Campbell Betancourt (Los Angeles, 1984) is a Princeton educated American curator who has been working in South and Southeast Asia since 2010, primarily in India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. Since 2013, she has served as the Founding Artistic Director of Dhaka-based Samdani Art Foundation, Bangladesh and Chief Curator of the Dhaka Art Summit, leading the critically acclaimed 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020 editions. Campbell Betancourt has developed the Dhaka Art Summit into a leading research and exhibitions platform for art from South Asia, bringing together artists, architects, curators, and writers from across South Asia through a largely commission-based model where new work and exhibitions are born in Bangladesh, also adding a scholarly element to the platform with a think tank connecting modern art histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia in collaboration with the Getty Foundation, Cornell University Center for Comparative Modernities, the Asia Art Archive, and the Samdani Art Foundation.