Entry
Free
Dates
Fri 2 May-Sun 21 Sep 2025
Hours
Tue-Sun
10am-5pm
and bank holidays
Location
Sunley Gallery
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.
A new commission to inaugurate Turner’s annual programme inviting artists to engage with the gallery’s distinctive architecture and coastal setting.
Namoda’s vibrant and figurative images interweave the personal with the historical, and the everyday with cultural mythologies. Born in Mapoto, Mozambique and currently living in Italy, she has lived across Africa, Europe, America and Asia. These experiences have influenced her perspective, allowing her to create nuanced visualisations of post-colonial Mozambique within an increasingly globalised world.
Recognised primarily for her paintings, Namoda’s installation for the Sunley Gallery window is inspired by a recent painting of two figures on a beach.
Drawing from her early film studies and interest in storytelling, Namoda creates images inspired by found photographs and memories, each populated by imagined characters. Her paintings function like cinematic stills, capturing fleeting moments that hint at broader, untold narratives. Influenced by Mozambican magical realism, film, mythology, and art history, her landscapes possess an ethereal, dreamlike quality. This atmosphere is heightened by her distinctive colour palette that seamlessly bridges the mundane and the metaphysical, grounding her work in the everyday and the spiritual.
Engaging with the histories of artist-designed stained glass windows, particularly those in chapels such as Henri Matisse’s luminous work at the Chapelle du Rosaire in the South of France, Namoda reimagines the window, bathed in colour and light, as a place of contemplation for visitors over the summer months. Namoda’s window will also be illuminated after dark, ensuring its radiant presence remains visible from the shoreline, creating a work that is visible by day and night.
The Sunley Gallery Commission is curated by Melissa Blanchflower, Senior Curator at Turner Contemporary. 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.
Accessibility Information
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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.
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A hearing loop system is in place at our retail and café counters.
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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.
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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 | 01843 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.
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We're open:
10am-5pm, Tuesday to Sunday
And every bank holiday. -
Turner Contemporary, Rendezvous, Margate, CT9 1HG
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