Khadija Saye

Khadija Mohammadou Saye (30 July 1992 – 14 June 2017), also known as Ya-Haddy Sisi Saye, was a Gambian-British photographer. Her photography explored her Gambian-British identity and was exhibited in 2017 in the first Diaspora Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Saye died in the Grenfell Tower fire.

Life and work Saye was born in Hammersmith and grew up in Ladbroke Grove. Her love of photography was fostered by after-school clubs run by IntoUniversity, a programme that seeks to remove barriers to participation in the arts by children from disadvantaged communities. Later she attended the University for the Creative Arts at Farnham and obtained a photography degree.

Saye's photography explored her Gambian-British identity. Her series of six wet plate collodion tintypes entitled Dwellings: in this space we breathe, based on Gambian spiritual practices, was exhibited in the Diaspora Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale from May to November 2017. Saye took part in a BBC TV documentary, Venice Biennale: Sink or Swim, which "follows a team of diverse emerging artists as they install and prepare to launch the first ever Diaspora Pavilion in a Venetian palazzo during the Venice Biennale." and from 2015 to 2016 worked at PEER, a comtemporary arts centre in Hoxton, as a Creative Access intern.

Personal life and death Saye lived with her mother, Mary Ajaoi Augustus Mendy, on the 20th floor of Grenfell Tower in North Kensington. Both Saye and her mother died in the Grenfell Tower fire on 14 June 2017.

Legacy

The BBC TV programme on the Venice Biennale that included Saye, originally scheduled to air on 17 June 2017, and transmitted in September 2017 as Venice Biennale: Britain's New Voices.

Most of Saye's work was destroyed in the fire. The six tintypes on exhibit in Venice survived, as did three others. Portfolios of nine silkscreen prints were produced from high-resolution scans of these works. In June 2017, Tate Britain announced that it would exhibit a silkscreen from one of these sets, Sothiou, in the memorials section. Works by her were part of the reopening show of Kettle's Yard in Cambridge on 10 February 2018. and from 3 December 2020 to 7 October 2021 in the Entrance Hall Gallery of the British Library. Between 23 October 2020 and 1 August 2021 the British Library also exhibited one of the original tintypes, Peitaw, as part of the exhibition Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women's Rights.

Sales of the silkscreen portfolios and other works by Saye benefit her estate and the Khadija Saye Arts arts education programme at IntoUniversity, The launch coincided with the unveiling of Breath is Invisible, in which large-scale prints of the nine images in Saye's In this space we breathe series were displayed across the façade of 236 Westbourne Grove in West London. This was the first of three exhibitions to run at the space intended to explore social inequality and injustice. An auction of her works at Christie's as part of the Post-War and Contemporary Day Auction in 2018 realised £8,750 for the first of the silkscreen portfolios, and £43,750 for the original tintype of Nak Bejjen from In this space we breathe.

Selected exhibitions Discerning Eye, Mall Galleries, London, 2014 Diaspora Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Palazzo Pisani S Marina, Venice, Italy, 2017 Tate Modern, London, 2017 Actions, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, 2018 In this space we breathe, British Library, London, 2020–21 Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women's Rights, British Library, London, 2020–21