WHATIFTHEWORLD

About the Gallery
Founded in 2012, WHATIFTHEWORLD is a recognised contemporary art gallery both within South Africa and internationally. Part question, part purpose and part statement, their name anticipates the gallery’s program: a host of ambitious projects that promote curiosity and thought. With a strong focus on Africa and the African diaspora, the gallery represents influential artists who engage with global and local contemporary art and socio-political contexts. The gallery is dedicated to showing resolute solo projects and multi-disciplinary installations, with an interest in creating an environment that allows artists the freedom to create significant exhibitions.

About the Presentation
Nabeeha Mohamed will make her New York debut in a solo presentation with WHATIFTHEWORLD, a first-time exhibitor at Independent. Mohamed’s practice centres the domestic interior as a charged site where personal memory, cultural inheritance and South Africa’s unresolved histories converge. In this focused presentation of new still-life works, she turns to the kitchen not as a neutral space, but as a formative environment where care, labour and identity are shaped through repetition, gesture and tradition. Ordinary objects such as bowls, utensils, fruit and flowers are reconfigured to carry emotional and political weight, reflecting the entanglements of race, gender and class embedded in everyday life. Presented now, these works resonate with urgent global conversations around home, belonging and inherited histories, positioning the intimate domestic sphere as a critical lens through which broader social conditions are felt, negotiated and, at times, quietly resisted.