Cassi Namoda | Cape Town Art Fair | Solo Booth

Cassi Namoda is a painter whose work transfigures the cultural mythologies and historical narratives of life in post-colonial Africa, particularly those of the artist’s native 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.

On show at Namoda’s solo booth as part of Tomorrows/Today curated by Natasha Becker and Dr Mariella Franzoni is a new body of work titled Mantakassa, Limp and no memory. Presenting new work that follows two exploratory threads; the depiction of the beggar in art history and reflections on mantakassa, a poison from sour yam in Mozambique which folklorically infers no memory of the past. 

During her time spent in residency at the Albers Foundation in South West Cork, Ireland, Namoda was fascinated by the deep and tragic history of the potato famine that had ruptured many lives and forced migration. The reality the Global South is faced with today is an ominous one with food scarcity, dangerous migrations, and threatening weather patterns that have been the subject of our concerns. It felt natural to Namoda to paint these depictions as a dovetailing of two accounts.