Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) presents Afflict the Comfortable, Comfort the Afflicted, a survey exhibition by Los Angeles–based artist Cauleen Smith. Curated by Thato Mogotsi, Curator of Contemporary Art at Zeitz MOCAA, the exhibition opens on Thursday, 20 November 2025, on Level 3 Silo Side, and runs until Sunday, 4 October 2026.
In her first major presentation on the African continent, Smith’s world-building projects come together in atmospheric installations that offer visitors a layered sensory experience. Short films and videos interact with drawings, sculpted objects, colourful textile banners and the sonic in an expansive exhibition that meditates on the artist’s ongoing concern with Black experimental cinema, Afrocentric aesthetics, Black feminism and the emancipatory uses of the utopic. Smith’s decades-long practice merges her interests in jazz and literature, spirituality, feminism, Afrofuturism and what she calls ‘…the everyday possibilities of the imagination.’
Curator Thato Mogotsi explains: ‘Afflict the Comfortable, Comfort the Afflicted extends beyond a survey of Cauleen Smith’s practice; it’s an invitation to imagine generosity as a radical act. Smith’s work demonstrates how rarely engaged archives – explored through the moving image and the sonic – can offer unlikely moments of relation, refuge and resistance. In bringing her world to Zeitz MOCAA, we also foreground a dialogue about how Black imagination continues to shape the ways we see, feel, and gather—across time, and across geographies.’
Smith is a prolific and widely recognised filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist whose practice engages with non-Western cosmologies, Afro-diasporic histories, and pan-African cultural icons. Interrelated bodies of work are inspired by post-Katrina New Orleans; Afrofuturist musician Sun Ra; Malian photographer Malick Sidibé; and legendary jazz musician and devotional leader Alice Coltrane-Turiyasangitananda, among others. It is within their journeys and the landscapes they navigated that Smith’s own speculative interest in the utopic potential of Black gathering and placemaking emerges.
Smith first came to prominence in the 1990s as part of a generation of filmmakers challenging Hollywood’s limited portrayals of Black life. Her debut feature film, Drylongso (1998), was celebrated at the Sundance Film Festival and, in 2023, was re-released in a 4K restoration by the renowned film archive, Criterion Collection, reaffirming its enduring cultural significance.
The exhibition’s title references one of Smith’s text-based banners, inspired by Paul Thek’s 1985 painting of the same name, which in turn borrows the phrase coined by American writer and humorist Finley Peter Dunne to describe the role of the press in society. Smith subverts this phrase, transforming it into a call to action—one that urges us to extend collective care as a form of creative resistance, while unsettling systems of privilege and power.
Featured works include Smith’s celebrated films A Woman Discusses Her Skirt (2008), Remote Viewing (2011), Pilgrim (2017), and Sojourner (2018). These films traverse the cultural and storied urban landscapes of Los Angeles, New Orleans, Texas and Chicago, honouring figures and communities whose contributions to liberatory traditions continue to sustain Black life. Her films reject the constraints of linear time, instead tracing unexpected connections across history, memory, and imagination.
The exhibition’s spatial design reflects Smith’s intertextual and research-driven approach, drawing on longstanding forms of Black expression. Through sound, light, and a sensorial filmic style, Smith invites viewers to consider what becomes possible when movement, gathering, and the quest for Black utopias are placed at the centre of our collective imagination.
In a recent profile, the artist Cauleen Smith reflects: ‘I know that art is powerful and that it can be used for change. But I think its real power is in the way it resists everything that is about power. The potency of art comes from the way in which it doesn't need any power to affect you. It doesn't have to coerce you. It doesn't have to force you to do anything. It extends itself and then people come towards it.’
Afflict the Comfortable, Comfort the Afflicted forms part of Zeitz MOCAA’s ongoing series of in-depth, research-based solo exhibitions that highlight and contextualise the practices of important artists from Africa and its Diaspora. In this spirit of radical solidarity, the museum continues to look beyond the continent’s borders—examining the ways the world is implicated in Africa, and Africa in the world.
Zeitz MOCAA’s exhibition and curatorial programming is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation and BMW South Africa. This exhibition is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.
meet the artist
Cauleen Smith
Cauleen Smith (b. Riverside, California, 1967) is a filmmaker and artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. With a BA in cinema from San Francisco State University (1991) and an MFA in filmmaking from the University of California-Los Angeles (1998). Her interdisciplinary work expands from histories and practices of experimental film, including structuralism, Third World cinema, and science fiction.
Smith’s works have been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA and the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway among others. Smith has received numerous grants and awards, including a Heinz Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Her films screen internationally, and her works are in public collections around the world, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Image credit: Artist Portrait by Joshua Franzos.