In May 2017 Chris Ofili was at a gathering on the Lido in Venice, following the opening of an exhibition, when he was told a young artist wanted to meet him. Ofili, 54, cuts a lean, muscular figure, but with more salt than pepper in his hair, he is feeling his years professionally. “When you get to this age you’re a little bit disconnected from the younger group,” he says. “And I thought, ‘That’s really nice. Somebody would actually formally like to meet me.’”
In the near distance, he saw 24-year-old Khadija Saye, whose work was being exhibited at the Biennale with other emerging artists as part of the Diaspora Pavilion. “She had this really radiant presence,” recalls Ofili. “There was an undeniably genuine, honest presence about her. And I said yeah, of course I want to meet her. We did a brief selfie and maybe exchanged a few words. But it was enough to realize, ‘That’s a good person there and I hope she makes really good art, because that combination can be quite special.’”
Saye was, in fact, on the brink of a breakthrough with a haunting photographic series called Dwelling: In This Space We Breathe. “It turns out she made quite extraordinary, mystical, alchemic self-portraits and works fusing her history and the history of photography,” says Ofili. “This work that reached into the past but also went into the future.”
Just over a month later Saye was dead. She lived with her mother, Mary Mendy, on the 20th floor of the inflammable tomb and now charred monument to corporate disgrace, otherwise known as Grenfell Tower, where 72 people died in a fire. Saye had no phone to call for help—the police had taken it during a wrongful arrest—so she took to Facebook to ask for prayers and advice as she struggled to escape through the thick smoke.
A couple of days later, Ofili was back in his studio in Trinidad when he heard Saye had passed away. “At that point the fire was still burning,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘What?’ I didn’t really understand what you’re supposed to do with the loss of somebody that young who had such huge potential.”
Today, in a piece by Ofili called Requiem, an image of Saye hovers high on the middle wall of Tate Britain’s northern staircase. Emerging from a cluster of yellow and orange, encircled by the souls of the perished, she holds to her ear an andichurai, a Gambian incense pot and treasured possession of her mother. It is a depiction based on one of Saye’s own photographs, currently exhibited at Tate Modern, also to be shown alongside Requiem.
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