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  • Visual Art

DanceAfrica Visual Art

May 7—Jun 30, 2025
    Part of
  • DanceAfrica Festival 2025 Program
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

UPCOMING Performances

      VENUE

      Peter Jay Sharp Building
      Dorothy W. Leavitt Lobby

      TICKET INFORMATION

      Free
      All performances will adhere to protocols developed in accordance with New York State regulations and in consultation with medical professionals for the safety of our artists, audiences, and staff. 

      Leadership support for
      BAM’s strategic initiatives provided by:

      Mellon Foundation

      Leadership support for
      BAM Access Programs provided by
      the Jerome L. Greene Foundation

      JL Greene

      Leadership support for
      BAM programming provided by:

      Howard Gilman

      Leadership support for
      BAM’s strategic initiatives provided by:

      Altman Foundation

      Leadership support for
      BAM Visual Art provided by
      Toby Devan Lewis (in memoriam)

      • Share the Brooklyn magic! Donate to BAM today at BAM.org/support
      • Cassi Namoda
        Cassi Namoda, born in 1988 in Maputo, Mozambique, explores the history and culture of post-colonial Africa, especially the exchange between vernacular traditions and Portuguese colonialism in the Lusophone continent, in her work.

        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.

        Namoda’s work is collected by several important museums, including The Pérez Art Museum in Miami, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Jumex in Mexico City, and X Museum in Beijing. She has held solo exhibitions at a number of notable galleries, including Xavier Hufkens and Goodman Gallery. Namoda has lived in Kenya, Uganda, Benin, Haiti, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, and the United States, and currently divides her time between New York and Italy.
      • MoCADA
        The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) celebrates the cultural breadth of Africa and its diaspora via the production and presentation of visual, literary, and performing arts, and uses art, education, and advocacy as vehicles for social change. More than a museum, MoCADA is a community bridge, advocating for equity and access for underserved residents in every sector, and an arts incubator that has given a platform to over 100 artists from 20+ countries across the African diaspora.

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