DanceAfrica 2025: Cassi Namoda

MoCADA is honored to participate as a BAM DanceAfrica 2025 art partner. Meet Cassi Namoda, the visual artist MoCADA selected to represent Mozambique in this year’s festival, and see her magical work on view at BAM throughout the celebration.

Each year BAM’s DanceAfrica festival offers a special presentation of visual art to coincide with their schedule of music, dance, and cultural performances. Curated by MoCADA since 2024, this year’s visual artwork will center “At the Breast, At the Motherhood (the place where your mother originates),”  a mixed-media art work by Mozambican artist Cassi Namoda, as commissioned and curated by MoCADA Executive Director + Chief Curator, Amy Andrieux.

This special piece loaned from Switzerland will be on view from May 6 – June 9 in the lobby of BAM’s Peter J. Sharp building.

At the Breast, At the Motherhood (the place where your mother originates) by Cassi Namoda, 2022. Acrylic on canvas, 144.8 x 271.8 cm.

“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

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 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, and she has held solo exhibitions at a number of notable galleries, including Xavier Hufkens and Goodman Gallery. Namoda was born in Maputo, Mozambique, in 1988, and has also lived in Kenya, Uganda, Benin, Haiti, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic and the United States. Currently she divides her time between New York and Italy.

This Memorial Day weekend, the nation’s largest festival dedicated to African diasporic dance and music opens up Brooklyn’s stages to the ancestral history and vital living artistry of Mozambique. Now in its 48th year, DanceAfrica 2025 culminates in Mozambique: Movement! Magic! Manifestation!, an extraordinary dance and music performance celebrating the culture of Mozambique. Featuring performances by The Song & Dance Company of Mozambique, Mama Coumba Saaraba, The Billie’s Youth Arts Academy Dance Ensemble, and the DanceAfrica Spirit Walkers, this dazzling event will shake up your senses and stir your heart.

Along with this spellbinding performance, BAM partners with longtime neighbors, first-time visitors, the DanceAfrica Council of Elders, and partners at Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), and The Billie Holiday Theatre (formerly Restoration Arts),, 651 Arts and countless others to create the nation’s largest festival of African dance—and Brooklyn’s unofficial start to summer. Featuring traditional dance and music from Mozambique, classes, workshops, late-night dance parties, visual art, a dazzling cinematic series, and the iconic outdoor bazaar, experience the sights, sounds, and magic of Brooklyn’s most unmissable celebration.