In her first US solo museum exhibition, the Mozambican artist transforms memory, myth and postcolonial history into luminous dreamscapes.
16 September 2026
What does it mean to remember a place while imagining what it could become? For Cassi Namoda, painting becomes a space where memory, folklore, and mythology converge, creating vivid worlds shaped by Mozambique’s histories and cultural landscapes.
‘Life Is the Seamstress of Dreams’, presented at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, marks Namoda’s first solo museum presentation in the United States. Born in Maputo in 1988, the artist draws on childhood memories of post-independence Mozambique, weaving together vernacular design, storytelling, cinema and art history to construct intimate visions of a postcolonial future.
Her richly coloured paintings move between romance, melancholy and the uncanny. Black heroines, or Marias, occupy liminal spaces where desire, anxiety and the divine intersect, while references to figures such as filmmaker Ousmane Sembène and photographer Ricardo Rangel anchor Namoda’s imagined worlds within broader Pan-African histories.
Alongside paintings, including newly commissioned works, the exhibition features films that reflect her practice of collecting, archiving, and reassembling found imagery into dreamlike landscapes.
Curated by Jessica Bell Brown, the exhibition offers an evocative encounter with an artist reshaping memory into possibility.
This exhibition will be on view at the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, Richmond, Virginia, from 18 September 2026 until 21 February 2027.
