Cassi Namoda: Life Is The Seamstress of Dreams

Curated by ICA Executive Director Jessica Bell Brown, Cassi Namoda’s (b. 1988, Maputo, Mozambique) exhibition of paintings and video works from the past five years to the present will be the first solo museum presentation of the artist’s work in the United States. Centered on the idea of pastiche as a strategy for bringing together a wide range of cultural reference points and narratives, the exhibition will parse the forward edges of the artist’s interests in postcoloniality, magical realism, design, and world-building through a lusotropical and Global South lens.

Cassi Namoda’s work explores the history and culture of post-colonial Africa, especially the exchange between vernacular traditions and Portuguese colonialism in the Lusophone continent. Namoda’s syncretic paintings are woven from a capacious symbolic language—she references global mythologies, indigenous folk art, European painting traditions, colonial power systems, and more in her dreamlike narratives and sensual landscapes. Characters and motifs (conjoined twins, fierce suns) recur within these intimate tableaux, often bolstered by references to literary, cinematic, and architectural aesthetics. Washed colors, bold compositions and flat perspective further the paintings’ aura of magical realism. The result is often a sense of romance and saudade injected into modernity and the art historical canon. Her work is represented in several international collections and museums.