Mohammed Sami has created Still Alive, 2022 especially for Whitechapel Gallery to accompany ‘The London Open 2022’, 30 June – 4 September 2022.

‘Still Alive’ is the artist’s repeated answer to those who ask him ‘’how are you?’’, since leaving his homeland, Iraq, in 2007. This stock response is often uncomfortable, the sentence evoking both trauma and seemingly celebrating the act of living. Sami's edition relates to a series of paintings of the same name - Still Alive aims to pun the genre of Still Life. In addition, Sami is interested in the contrast between the plants and the unidentified orange tube of pills, as a metaphor for life and death.