Cassi NamodaCyclone Idai and a mother's embrace with beloved son one late night in Beira Town (Dedicated to my family and all those who were victims of Cyclone Idai / 2019-2020), 2020
Cassi Namoda’s practice is deeply informed by her ancestral lineage and the lived realities of post-colonial Mozambique. Her paintings explore a wide range of subjects, from racial and cultural identity to the quiet rituals of everyday life. Born in Maputo and raised across multiple countries, Namoda draws from a transnational upbringing that shapes both the emotional and thematic scope of her work. Trained in cinema, she approaches painting with a storyteller’s sensibility, combining narrative structures with a sense of catharsis, humour, and joy. Photographic references, particularly those resembling film stills, often serve as starting points, allowing her to transform fleeting moments into layered reflections on memory, beauty, and loss.
Her compositions combine archival material, vernacular traditions, and imagined figures to create scenes that are both rooted in the present and resonant with historical depth. Namoda’s visual language incorporates expressive distortion, flattened perspective, and elements of magical realism, resulting in a painterly style that feels at once intimate and otherworldly. The interplay between past and present, tradition and modernity, and personal and collective experience is central to her work. Through these juxtapositions, Namoda examines how history is internalised and how identity is shaped across generations. Her paintings do more than depict life in Mozambique – they open up space for reflection, offering poetic meditations on displacement, belonging, and the layered complexity of human experience.
