DanceAfrica Visual Art

Ensuring that DanceAfrica 2025 is a sensation engaging all artistic disciplines and engulfing all of our senses, our programming partners at The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) showcase “At the Breast, At the Motherhood (the place where your mother originates),” a 2022 painting by Cassi Namoda, an internationally renowned Mozambique-born artist.

In this horizontal painting, Cassi Namoda revisits the art historical canon—the classic theme of the bathers—especially the one of impressionists, like Degas and Bonnard. Here the composition is inspired by a photograph of a tribe in Swaziland, where young women bathe naked as part of a prenuptial ritual.

This painting depicts African women caring for each other in a sisterly way, while their different body positions (rather than their facial expressions) express various feelings and sensations, discomfort.

A severed head looms over the composition, lightly drawn as if exuding from the sky, and echoing a headless torso on the opposite side. The abstract, vibrant background completes the impression of a magical realism.

The body language expresses the ancestral traditions and the need for filiation, as well as the ongoing cultural and physical ruptures with the motherland.—Axelle Blanc, Associate Director, · Xavier Hufkens

Join us on IG Live on Saturday, May 24 at 10am for an intimate artist talk with Cassi Namoda in conversation with MoCADA's Amy Andrieux: @bam_brooklyn @cas_amandaa @mocada_museum