Cassi Namoda is a painter whose work interweaves the personal with the historical. She was born in Maputo, Mozambique, and has lived in several different countries; her nomadic lifestyle and multicultural identity have long informed her work. She originally studied cinema, and she thus considers narrative frameworks, storytelling and the presence of imagined characters to be significant elements in her practice. Combining personal memories with archival references, she attempts to access emotional interiority and communicate the human experience in all its subtlety. The duality between past and present, colonialism and postcolonialism, Africa and Europe, spiritual traditions and a globalised world is a latent force in her paintings. An engagement with art history—and probing thereof—provides a way of confronting the nuances inherent in conflicting ideologies and mutable identities, at once challenging and venerating the canon. Namoda relates expressionism to emotional intensity, dissonant tones and figural distortions; at the same time, surrealism manifests itself in her work through her embrace of magical realism.