'Quakers know the importance of remaining ‘in the silence’, as Khadija’s work and words encourage us to do.' Photo: Peitaw, 2017, courtesy of the estate of Khadija Saye
in this space we breathe, by Khadija Saye
Photographer: Khadija Saye. Review by Simon Webb
Among the powerful exhibits at the new Faith Museum in Bishop Auckland is a row of images by Khadija Saye, a Gambian-British photographer born in London in 1992. This series, in this space we breathe, was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2017, and has also been displayed at the British Library.
At the Faith Museum, Saye’s pictures hang in a long, cool, well-lit gallery near the end of the visitor route, with other modern works. Peitaw (left), a typical picture from the series, shows Khadija herself in traditional Gambian clothing, clutching a posy of cowrie shells to her mouth. Other pictures show her in variations on the African costume, different artefacts often obscuring her face.
The pictures are silk-screen prints, made using the collodion tintype process, a Victorian technique that Saye described as ‘laborious’. Once exposed, the glass plate has to be developed very quickly. Other modern pictures taken using this technique sometimes give the impression that a time-traveller from our age has somehow wandered into a photographer’s studio around 1855. In Saye’s case, the sepia-toned results do look like pictures taken over a century and a half ago, but by a photographer with a remarkably modern sensibility.
This is slow photography, and the resulting images demand a long, slow, thoughtful look. Saye evidently found that the process of making them encouraged spiritual reflection. She regarded the business of developing the plates in a solution of silver nitrate as a kind of baptism, and felt that the result addressed ‘the current disposable era where materials are rapidly produced and short-lived. We forget to live in the moment, remain in the silence, and work on our internal connections’. Certainly these pictures could hardly be more different from the instant high-definition snaps everybody now takes using their phones.
Saye’s ‘internal connections’ are also interesting. The child of a Christian mother and a Muslim father, she was brought up attending both mosques and churches. But she is also clearly able to find the spiritual in less likely places, such as the photographic dark-room.
Quakers know the importance of remaining ‘in the silence’, as Khadija’s work and words encourage us to do. For Saye, the making of this series helped her reach that luminous place from somewhere altogether darker. In the Venice Biennale catalogue, she wrote that the work ‘was created from a personal need for spiritual grounding after experiencing trauma’.
More trauma was to come for Khadija Saye. She was one of the seventy-two people who perished in the Grenfell Tower fire on 14 June, 2017.
Readers can donate to Khadija Saye Arts, a cause set up in Saye’s honour, at: www.estateofkhadijasaye.com/khadija-saye-arts.
Comments
Nine of Khandija Saye’s pictures are at the Tate Modern exhibition, “A World in Common”, until 14 January. Her image is also on the staircase between the Duveen gallery and the lower ground floor at Tate Britain, in “Requiem”, a major work by Chris Ofili.
By Abigail Maxwell on 4th January 2024 - 8:51
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