Cassi Namoda | Life has become a foreign language
Cassi Namoda Life has become a foreign language Goodman Gallery Cape Town 14 July – 3 September 2022
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.
Life has become a foreign language pulls at familiar thematic threads in Namoda’s practice: imagination, feeling, archive, memories and regional context. 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.
Artworks
About
Cassi Namoda
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.
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