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We are open Tuesday to Sunday, 10am–5pm, and Bank Holidays.

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Commissions

Cassi Namoda:
Sunley Gallery
Commission

Fri 2 May–Sun 21 Sep 2025

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Entry

Free

Dates

Fri 2 May–Sun 21 Sep 2025

Hours

Tue–Sun, 10am–5pm
and Bank Holidays

Location

Sunley Gallery
Turner Contemporary

This summer, artist Cassi Namoda transforms our iconic Sunley Gallery windows overlooking Margate’s beaches and the North Sea. Marking Namoda's first institutional project in Europe.

Admission to Turner is free. A one-off or regular donation will help support artists to realise exciting new exhibitions and inspire over 300,000 children, young people and adults each year with free access to art and creative activities.

What are you doing by my sea?  

Recognised primarily for her vibrant paintings that interweave the ancestral and the present day with Luso-African histories and mythologies, What are you doing by my sea? is Cassi Namoda’s first site-specific, public artwork.

Born in 1988 in Maputo, Mozambique, and now based in Italy, Namoda has lived across Africa, Europe, America, and Asia. These varied experiences shape her nuanced depictions of coastal towns and urban life in post-colonial Mozambique. 

Drawing on her background in film studies and a deep interest in storytelling, Namoda populates her works with characters from found images. Resembling cinematic stills, her compositions capture fleeting moments that hint at broader, untold narratives. The title of this window installation is drawn from a line spoken by the female protagonist in Hyenas (1992), a film by Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty. The story centres around a former couple reimagined by Namoda on a Mozambican beach at sunset. Rather than illustrating the cinematic scene, Namoda transforms her memory of it into a new landscape that is rich with emotional tension, the complexities of place and a sense of both separation and return.

Influenced by art history, Mozambican literature and folklore, Namoda blends references across time and geography in this work—from JMW Turner’s seascapes and Margate’s renowned sunsets to Mia Couto’s magical realist fiction and artist-designed stained glass, particularly Henri Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire in the South of France. Conceived as a place of contemplation for visitors over the summer months, Namoda’s distinctive colour palette and the changing natural light from the window bridges the everyday and the spiritual. 

This is the first Sunley Gallery Commission, Turner Contemporary’s new annual programme inviting artists each summer to engage with the gallery’s distinctive architecture and coastal setting.

View the window from outside the gallery; it will be illuminated in the evenings until 11pm. 

Curated by Melissa Blanchflower, Senior Curator.  

Cassi Namoda realised this project with designer Charles Dorrance-King.

Production is by Vinyline.

About the artist

Cassi Namoda (b. 1988, Maputo, Mozambique) currently lives and works in Italy.

Recent group exhibitions were held at Wellcome Collection, London (2024) and MoMu, Antwerp (2023), and her work also features in When We See Us, a major touring exhibition exploring a century of Pan-African figurative painting at Bozar, Brussels (2025). Recent solo exhibitions include Cranford Collection, London (2024) and at the Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2024) alongside Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (2024, 2022), 303 Gallery, New York (2023), Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2020), Pippy Holdsworth Gallery, London (2020) and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles (2019). Namoda is currently participating in to carry, Sharjah Biennale 16, Sharjah, UAE.

Namoda’s work is held in the public collections at Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland; MACAAL, Marrakesh; Long Museum, Shanghai; and the Studio Museum, Harlem, New York, among others. In 2023, she was a resident at Thread Senegal – Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Sinthian, Senegal; and in 2025, she will join the residency at the NESR Foundation, Luanda, Angola.

The artist Cassi Namoda sits in a low wooden chair with her paintings on the floor behind her.

Accessibility Information

We offer free monthly BSL tours of all our exhibitions which you can book here. 

We also subtitle all our films where possible and offer written transcripts of both films and audio works on display.  

A hearing loop system is in place at our retail and café counters.

We’re wheelchair accessible, with step-free access and a lift serving both floors. You can enter the gallery via the access ramp to the right of the entrance steps. 

You can also borrow a wheelchair or portable stool during your visit, and our staff will be happy to help if you require any additional assistance. 

Large print versions of the exhibition text and magnifying sheets are available. Please ask a member of staff if you would like to use them.  

Our staff are trained in delivering audio descriptive tours.  If you would like more information about booking an audio described tour please get in touch with us: access@turnercontemporary.org | +44(0)1843 233 000 (operated daily 10am – 5pm)  

Audio versions of the exhibition text can be found on our free digital guide on the Bloomberg Connects app. For more information and to download the app click here.

Entry to the exhibition is free. 

We're open: 
10am-5pm, Tuesday to Sunday
And every bank holiday. 

Turner Contemporary, Rendezvous, Margate, CT9 1HG

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