Khadija Saye was 24 years old. Khadija Saye was a Gambian-British photographer who lived in West London. She had shown her work at the Venice Biennale in 2017 and she had taken part in a BBC documentary about her experience in Venice and her work. Khadija Saye was one of 72 people (including 18 children) who died in the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017.
Of course, all seventy-two of those people (and eighteen of them were children) had lives and stories but Chris Ofili, who has been commissioned by Tate Britain to create an artwork for their staircase, chose to focus on Khadija Saye. To tell the story of one individual. Ofili also wanted a work that would be seen by so many to reflect a subject that affected us as a nation - and I don't know of a single person who wasn't absolutely horrified when they learned what had happened at Grenfell.
Not only the greatest loss of life in a residential fire since World War II but one that could, if the government and the powers that be cared about anyone other than themselves and their donors, have easily been prevented. Earlier this year I visited the Serpentine South Gallery to see Steve McQueen's powerful Grenfell film. When that finished everyone filed out in silence. Any other response would have felt inappropriate.
That won't, and can't, be the case with Ofili's Requiem. The location, for a start, is a staircase and one that gets quite busy. Many people will pass up and down without even really registering what the artwork is about. Possibly this dilutes its power. Possibly it makes it more powerful. Time will tell.
If you spend any amount of time taking it in it's hard to miss. There's the burning tower itself but way above it, more important than the tower, is Khadija Saye herself. The people in the tower, Ofili is saying, were people and people are always more important than any building. It is them we should remember. We should try and remember their lives as surely as we should demand justice for their deaths.
Ofili had met with Khadija Saye in Venice in 2017, just a month before she died, so the work has a personal importance to him. He saw her as a "powerful creative force of transformation" and didn't just admire her work, he admired her as a person and for her advocacy of greater diversity in the arts. Khadija Saye had said "if you don't see yourself represented you don't think you can do it. It's the idea of opening the door for the next generation".
A reminder to all of both a life, seventy-two lives, cut short and a reminder to all how about how social inequality can play out in a country that has, over the last thirteen years particularly, become ever more tougher for those who are not rich. The rich have got (much) richer and the poor have got (much) poorer. Exhibitions (like concerts, like heating, and like eating) have become too expensive for many but Ofili's work is free for all and I salute him for making it and shining a bright light on an event that is correctly seen as a very dark moment in British history.
I'd not visited Tate Britain specifically to see it, in fact I didn't even know it was there, but while I was there I thought I'd take in another of Ofili's socially aware works that was on show elsewhere in the gallery. 1998's No Woman No Cry (which features his then trademark material of elephant faeces) is a colourful depiction of Doreen Lawrence and, if you look closely, you can see that in each of her tears is an image of her son Stephen who was murdered by racist thugs in 1993.
For Ofili, the Grenfell fire brought about the same feelings of sadness and injustice he had on learning of Stephen Lawrence's murder. It'd be nice to think these injustices, these crimes, would one day come to an end but history, and the current divided state of the country, suggests not. Ofili's work had hope but I'm not sure our current reality has much.
No comments:
Post a Comment