Cassi Namoda: Life has become a foreign language

“Life has become a foreign language” pulls at familiar thematic threads in Cassi 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.

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.