Goodman Gallery presents Life has become a foreign language - Cassi Namoda’s first exhibition in Cape Town, featuring new paintings produced by the artist during a residency in the city earlier this year. The exhibition follows Namoda’s second solo exhibition on the African continent and her debut exhibition at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg in 2020.
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These new paintings also meditate on the history of painting itself and consider the significance of photography in the African continent, stitched together with Namoda’s personal experiences. Namoda experiments with shadows for the first time, moving between representations of haunting memories or visions within surrealist landscapes.
The exhibition is divided into two series defined by differing scales and approaches to addressing the complex realities experienced by Black women, reflecting specifically on pain, vulnerability and alienation. There is prominent experimentation with painting methods as well as a focused palette with a recurring use of the colour orange across both series.
The large-scale works anchor the show, presenting powerful portraits of a Malagasy woman and mark the artist’s largest portraits to date. Referencing the intensity of Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings and embracing surrealist visual cues, these works offer feminine remakes of Namoda’s masculine figures from her recent solo exhibition The sun has not yet burnt off the dew in São Paulo last year.
Life has become a foreign language expands on Namoda’s impulse to revisit historic scenes, adding layers of complexity rooted in a desire to recontextualise. By referencing archival images, such as Emperor Negus’ wet nurse and Mozambican photographer Ricardo Rangel’s reflections on life in Mozambique, Namoda marks moments of celebration and highlights the historic residue on Black women’s lives, offering new readings that interrogate the context that informed the original images.
The artist applies elements of photorealism to parts of the body to insert layers and reinforce surrealist sentiments. For example, the skin of the figures is illuminated, presenting an essence of light entry but without indication of its source. The impression of self-illumined figures suggests a divine otherworldly presence.
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Artist Bio
Cassi Namoda (b. 1988, Maputo, Mozambique) is known for her strong colour palette and narrative approach. Her hybrid narratives are at once wondrous and poignant, everyday and fantastical, archival and current. Namoda’s work transfigures the cultural mythologies and historical narratives of life in post-colonial Africa, particularly those of the artist’s familial home of Mozambique. Namoda’s paintings are highly elusive, drawing upon literary, cinematic and architectural influences that capture the expansiveness of her specifically Luso-African vantage point. The idiosyncratic subjects who appear and reappear in Namoda’s paintings also convey this hybridity: they emerge from African indigenous religions just as much as they spring from Western mythologies. Her work borrows from an art historical canon and arises from vernacular photography in equal measure. While they appear straightforward, her images are conceptually rigorous and portray figures with complex narratives. Namoda is equally attentive to landscape, creating scenes that depict both the rural and the urban through a surreal lens.
In 2024, Namoda presented her first institutional exhibition and most significant on the continent, titled 'Is it sunny or cloudy in the land you live on?' at the Norval Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa. Throughout the exhibition Namoda explores landscape in multiple ambiguous other worldly forms.
Notable solo exhibitions include: 'Life has become a foreign language,' Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2022); 'To Live Long is To See Much,' Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2020); 'Little is Enough for Those with Love/Mimi Nakupenda,' The Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019); and 'Bar Texas,' 1971, Library Street Collective, Detroit (2017).
Group shows include 'ECHO. Wrapped in Memory,' MoMu, Antwerp; 'When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting,' Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2022 - 2023); 'American Women,' La Patinoire Royale-Galerie Valérie Bach (2020).
Collections include: Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; MACAAL, Marrakesh; and The Studio Museum; New York.
Namoda lives and works in Italy.
