"C/O Berlin" had always been one of those special "must-go" places I had no right to miss every time finding myself in Berlin on short visits to friends — long before I could ever imagine it would become my second home. Now, after three years of exile, with "C/O" being a place I could drop in on any day, I take time to plan a visit ahead, choosing the time and ensuring I have a few hours to study every photographer on the show — to be present in the moment of the contact both with the image and the story it brings. The visit to "A World in Common. Contemporary African Photography" running in Amerika Haus till May 7 was not an exception. And the stories displayed on the walls accompanied by the mystic sounds of Zina Saro-Wiwa's video played on the ground floor were so diverse, deep, and intense that, when quitting into the dark buzz of a typical Berlin night, I felt I was back from a long journey.

One of the names that remained in my memory and led to more extensive reading and questioning was that of Khadija Saye — British-born artist of Gambian parentage who tragically died in the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, a horrible incident that carried away the lives of 70 people and put seven organizations under investigation for professional misconduct so far. Khadija passed away in her mid 20s, after a successful debut at the 57th Venice Biennale where her works were exhibited in the Diaspora Pavilion. The young woman’s mother, Mary Ajaoi Augustus Mendy, also died in the fire. The terrifying rate at which the flame spread from the fourth floor up the tower, with cladding panels quickly catching on fire and due to the absence of both central alarm and properly closing fire doors, left hundreds trapped on upper floors. The tragedy would be later described as "Grenfell Tower inferno".

When looking at the self-portraits from Khadija’s renowned series In This Space We Breathe, one cannot but feel a certain symbolism. Applying a 19th-century wet collodion photographic process, which assumes the gradual appearance of the image on a glass plate, Khadija created ethereal, haunting portraits that seem to hover between presence and absence, visibility and erasure. When commenting on the logic behind this choice, Saye wrote the following, "…Image-making became a ritual in itself. [In] making wet plate collodion tintypes no image can be replicated and the final outcome is out of the creator’s control. Within this process, you surrender yourself to the unknown, similar to what is required by all spiritual higher powers: surrendering and sacrifice."

The artworks on metal sheets she eventually produced are called "tintypes" - only six of them survived the fire. Others were destroyed, including a suitcase containing some of the objects featured in the series. The silkscreen prints featured in the Berlin exhibition were made from the recovered raw scans.

The very choice of medium — laborious, fragile, and steeped in historical weight — parallels the themes Khadija was exploring: identity, displacement, ancestry, and spiritual continuity. The images, taken in her domestic environment and referencing traditional Gambian rituals, speak quietly but powerfully to the ongoing interplay between body and memory, trauma and belief.

In every portrait a special spiritual Gambian artefact was used of which the artist learnt during her visits to the relatives back on the continent. In one we see the woman holding a batch of chewing-sticks, the branches of "salvadora persica", used in Senegambia as purification and invocation of the spirits of the ancestors. In another she covers her face with a string of protective amulets once belonging to her father. Wearing amulets with the words from the Qur’an is a common Islamic practice in Africa. Particularly mysterious is a tintype with a cow horn placed on the woman’s back by the anonymous healer — such objects were common tools that served to suck impurities from a person’s body. The visual, and most probably chemically accidental effect of smoke that seems to be coming from the horn now looks like an omen.

Khadija Saye herself once wrote of the relationship between her art, the body, and trauma: "We exist in the marriage of physical and spiritual remembrance. It’s in these spaces… [that] we identify with our physical and imagined bodies. Using myself as the subject, I felt it necessary to physically explore how trauma is embodied in the black experience." This statement captures not only the existential framework of her art but also the affective atmosphere it creates — a space where grief, ancestry, and survival are deeply intertwined.

In many ways, Saye’s work invites comparison with the haunting self-portraits of another female photographer working in self-portraiture — Francesca Woodman. Both the artists used their own bodies as primary instruments of exploration, dissolving the boundary between subject and medium, presence and absence and questioning the very subject matter of time. Woodman, with her blurred forms and ghostlike exposures, evoked a similarly intense atmosphere of vulnerability and transience. Yet, while Woodman’s images now feel painfully prophetic in the light of her suicide at 22, there is a crucial difference in how we read Saye’s legacy. Her death was not chosen, not staged or sought. It was imposed — violent, avoidable, and rooted in systemic failure and indifference. Where Woodman seemed to retreat inward, collapsing into the self, Saye reached outward — to her heritage, to collective memory, to spiritual histories. Throught artistic means, her images document trauma, but also a search for healing.

Realizing what happened in the Grenfell Tower, Khadija’s images acquire a devastating poignancy. There is something achingly prescient about their blurred textures, their suspended breath. "In This Space We Breathe" becomes more than an artwork — it is a meditation on the continuity of lives, on dialogue with those who are no longer here and those we are yet to come, a reflection on what remains… and on how we are remembered. And Saye’s legacy, though abruptly cut short, continues to speak. It urges us to reckon not only with personal histories and inherited traditions but also with larger reasons and unspoken inequalities that allow tragedies like Grenfell to happen in the first place.

Her art, in the end, breathes where she no longer can.

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