Photographer · The Gambia
Khadija Saye
Khadija Saye (1992–2017) was a British-Gambian photographer whose tintype self-portrait series Dwelling: in this space we breathe explored the spiritual practices of her Gambian heritage. The work was shown at the 2017 Venice Biennale; weeks later, on 14 June 2017, she died with her mother in the Grenfell Tower fire in London. She was 24.
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A London photographer of Gambian heritage
Khadija Saye was born in London in 1992 to a Gambian family and grew up in the city. Both her parents came from The Gambia; her mother, Mary Mendy, was a Christian and her father, who survives her, is Muslim. She studied photography at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, and was mentored by the British artist Nicola Green. She began making work about identity, faith and belonging, and about the Gambian traditions she grew up with.
Dwelling: in this space we breathe
Her series Dwelling: in this space we breathe uses the nineteenth-century wet-plate collodion tintype process. In each self-portrait she holds an object linked to Gambian spiritual practice — amulets, a horn and other sacred objects — to her head or body. The small, dark, silvery images, made with a technique that is never entirely under control, speak of protection, inheritance and the search for something to hold on to. The series, nine self-portraits, explores what she called the migration of traditional Gambian spiritual practices. The objects in the images are sacred ones, which she obtained from different spiritual healers in The Gambia through exchange and prayer, and she said she made the series out of a personal need for spiritual grounding after trauma; the process of making the images, she said, became a ritual in itself. Several works have Wolof titles: Toor-Toor means "flower" and shows her adorned with flora, and in another image she takes part in a ritual with a tééré amulet and a cow horn. Nak Bejjen (2017) is a tintype on metal measuring 250 by 200 millimetres.
How to look at them: begin with the surface. A tintype is a unique image on a metal plate, so there is no negative and no second print, and the marks of the collodion, the uneven edges and the scratches are part of the picture. Then look at the hands and the objects, which are the subject. The images ask to be read slowly, as a kind of prayer or portrait of a practice, not as a likeness.
Venice, 2017
The series was shown in the Diaspora Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, held at the Palazzo Pisani Santa Marina from 13 May to 26 November 2017 and curated by David A. Bailey and Jessica Taylor for the International Curators Forum and the University of the Arts London. Saye was the youngest artist taking part. She had made nine tintypes for the series and showed six of them there.
Grenfell
On 14 June 2017, a fire destroyed Grenfell Tower, the tower block in west London where she lived; Saye and her mother were among the 72 people who died. She was 24.
Afterwards
Most of her work was lost in the fire. The nine images survive because they were scanned in high resolution, and from those scans Victoria Miro gallery published a portfolio of nine silkscreen prints, in an edition of 50, in aid of her estate and the Khadija Saye IntoArts Programme. The prints were made from raw scans of the tintypes. At auction in 2018 the tintype Nak Bejjen, the first of her works to be sold at auction, made £43,750. The portfolio was shown in Rock My Soul, a group exhibition curated by Isaac Julien at Victoria Miro in October 2019, and the British Library displayed the prints in its Entrance Hall Gallery from December 2020 to October 2021.
Where to see the work
The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane list works from Dwelling: in this space we breathe in their collections, and the British Library showed the silkscreen prints in 2020–21. Victoria Miro, the gallery that handles her estate, and the Khadija Saye IntoArts Programme keep her work visible; check each museum's page for what is on view. See our list of African photographers.
