Cassi NamodaMangitos pleasure, 2024
Cassi Namoda is a painter whose practice intricately brings together personal history, collective memory, and cultural inheritance. Born in Maputo and raised across multiple countries, her transnational upbringing informs the emotional and thematic breadth of her work. Trained in cinema, she approaches painting with a storyteller’s sensibility, drawing on narrative structures and imagined characters to explore intimate and societal experiences. Photographic references often initiate her process, particularly images that resemble film stills – arrested moments of everyday life imbued with quiet significance. Her paintings merge archival fragments with lived experience, yielding scenes that are at once contemporary and steeped in historical resonance. The tensions between past and present, colonial legacy and post-colonial identity, tradition and modernity, are consistently at play. Through these dualities, Namoda examines how history is internalised and performed. Expressionism’s emotive distortions and surrealism’s affinity for the uncanny are both visible in her visual language, giving form to the psychic and spiritual dimensions of life in Mozambique. Her scenes, rich with atmosphere, offer more than mere representations – they are meditations on belonging, displacement and the quiet complexity of human experience.
Namoda’s use of colour is deeply considered and evolving. Her palette, often evocative of the humid vibrancy of the tropics, has been further refined through recent research conducted during her residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. In her latest works, colour functions not simply as surface but as a carrier of meaning and emotion: warm hues interact with cooler tones to create visual and psychological tension, while soft passages of colour offer moments of respite. Her recurring use of pinkish-yellow dappled backgrounds and fine net-like overlays reinforces a formal continuity across the series. These motifs suggest both permeability and entrapment, inviting reflection on visibility, vulnerability and the porous boundaries of identity.
