WHATIFTHEWORLD is pleased to be presenting at  Independent 2026, taking place in New York from May 14 to May 17, 2026. This year, the gallery’s presentation features a solo exhibition by Nabeeha Mohamed

Booth #519

A grandfather wakes at sunrise. He walks quietly to the kitchen to switch on the kettle, to pick up a mug from the wooden shelf he built 15 years ago in the backyard of this home. He opens a window allowing the smell of wet grass to meet the smell of hot coffee. He stands outside the bedroom door of his stirring grandchild, holding the mug in his right hand, a small dog-eared book opened by his left. Last night he read the child to sleep and now he reads the house awake, reciting a poem about the glimmer of a red moth’s wing.

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These paintings are an accumulation of observations; molded, shrunken, stretched and arranged into a world that is very much my own, but that I hope feels like it could be yours too. It is a world in which its known parts (a spoon, a carrot, a windowsill, a flower) speak of home and belonging and it is a world in which its strange parts beckon curiosity.

In the creative domain of world-building, these paintings do not ask the shape of a city’s skyline or of languages spoken, but what we might need to foster and nurture within our most intimate spaces in order to point towards extravagant possibilities. If you look at anything long enough (give your undivided attention to a single unfurling leaf), the object of your seeing becomes uncanny; weird and wild enough that it may seem born of another world. I paint to remind myself of the wonder in the single unfurling leaf and so that perhaps you may be reminded of it too.

– Nabeeha Mohamed