WHATIFTHEWORLD is delighted to present a selection of works by Nabeeha Mohamed as part of our solo booth presentation at Untitled Art, Miami Beach 2024.

“In his essay Board Up the Doors, Tear Down the Walls, writer and poet Hanif Abdurraqib says: ‘I don’t know if I believe in rage as something always acting in opposition to tenderness. I believe, more often, in the two braided together. Two elements of trying to survive in a world once you have an understanding of that world’s capacity for violence.’

In this past year it has been increasingly difficult to reconcile the purpose and privilege of long hours on my feet, alone in front of my canvases, whilst witnessing the unspeakable violences cast upon dispossessed and displaced people across the world through images on the screen of my phone. Holding Abdurraqib’s words, I can recognise that the salvation in this grief and rage is the revealing of true community, of a chosen family born from love, each individual’s love in equilibrium and feeding the next. The strength of our highs are the strength of our lows and these paintings were born from this braiding. They serve as a devotion to all those I have learned from, talked to, laughed with, cried with, to all who have gathered at the table and shared in the feast of each of our identities, our experiences, our histories.

This work is an imagining of the shared space in the home, where families gather, to provide both physical and emotional nourishment in their togetherness. It is also a meditation on what we might define as home and at its core home can be understood as a site of belonging. My parents both come from big families; my mother one of nine children and my father one of six. Whether at Jummah lunch, Christmas dinner, or a cousin’s birthday, these are memories built of the constant hum of my aunts talking, the air thick with the embrace of simmering spices, cushions and chairs turned over in the familiar chaos of children playing. In some ways, I think these paintings speak to a dream of the home I would like to build—a home filled with objects borrowed from the memories of homes of family and friends who have nurtured me. In this process, I have added myself, and in its final image, I imagine a banquet feeding all who have fed me, both those who have passed and those who remain, so that within a single room—a shared space of safety, rest, and remembrance—we might find joy and sustenance.”

Text by Nabeeha Mohamed

I Belong There

I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born.
I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell
with a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own.
I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,
a bird’s sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.
I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.
I belong there. When heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to her mother.
And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears.
To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.
I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a
single word: Home.

– Mahmoud Darwish

Selected artworks available for viewing at Booth B5.