The Art of Counter-Remembrance

In 2017, a fire ripped through London’s Grenfell Tower, a high-rise social housing block, claiming the lives of 72 residents. As details of the tower’s prior upkeep gradually emerged, it became clear that the fire was the result of a long series of dire failings. Residents paid with their lives for decades of corner-cutting maintenance and a criminally mismanaged refurbishment. To many observers, the fire was not an isolated incident, but emblematic of a callous political and economic order.footnote¹ In the years since, a number of prominent artists have made works responding to the disaster. Steve McQueen, the film director and video artist, shot a film of the wreckage that was first shown at the Serpentine Galleries in 2023. Forensic Architecture, a collective based at Goldsmiths, produced several works including a series of video testimonies of survivors and a 3-D video model of the burning tower. The painter Chris Ofili, one of the Young British Artists cohort that emerged in the nineties, created a vast commemorative frieze at Tate Britain.

Though strikingly different in tone, these were all commemorative works by artists intent on keeping the tragedy in the public eye. They had grounds for concern. The government of then-prime minister Theresa May commissioned a public inquiry that took over seven years to deliver its final report, serving as a convenient means of deflecting public attention. Nine years on, criminal charges have still not been brought against any of the bodies under investigation. The recent decision to dismantle the remains of the tower has been seen by some bereaved families as an attempt to wipe out the most potent reminder of what happened.footnote²

Chris Ofili’s mural Requiem (2023), which covers three walls over the monumental staircase in the west wing of Tate Britain, puts forward a narrative of mourning that unfolds in three scenes. On the left a bearded figure in a tailcoat bows down while holding a burning model of the tower with ‘the reverence of someone that’s conducting a ceremony of loss or a Requiem’, in Ofili’s words.footnote³ In the central portion, a woman appears in a golden nimbus, holding a Gambian incense pot to her ear. This is a portrait of Khadija Saye, a young photographer known to Ofili who died in the fire. The nimbus framing her faintly resembles the rose window of a church and draws out the church-like proportions of the giant stairwell. In the third part of the frieze, two faun-like figures play wind instruments from which wavy plants seem to emerge. Here, to quote Ofili again, ‘the colours of the burning tower are transformed into those of a warm sunrise or sunset’.

In a fierce review in the pages of Art Monthly, the artist and critic Morgan Quaintance took Ofili to task for conceiving the fire in allegorical terms. Ofili, he wrote, has removed the tragedy from its context, rendering it ‘an event without a cause, an act of God’.footnote⁴ It is difficult not to agree. In offering a succession of dreamlike scenes, Ofili employs an artistic syntax at odds with the horror of the fire. Allegory is distancing. We tend to associate it with traditional works of remembrance—a winged personification of victory, a man in uniform representing the unknown soldier. Ofili is evidently trying to repurpose this tradition in his own style, but the result is anachronistic and ethereal. And the thrust of his narrative, which culminates in the scene of music making and plant growth, is conciliatory. Ofili says he imagines the music almost calling the souls of the victims ‘into a place of peace’.

Is this an appropriate response? An allegorical vision in which the burning tones of the fire resolve themselves into ‘those of a warm sunrise or sunset’ is out of line with the experiences of the friends and families of the victims, and the survivors who have been traumatized and displaced by the disaster. During Grenfell Testimony Week in January 2024, an outcome of the civil settlement, at which survivors spoke about the fire and its aftermath while representatives of the companies and public bodies charged with the tower’s upkeep and safety sat in attendance, one former resident, Hanan Wahabi, warned against turning the event into a ‘nice healing process’—adding that she hoped the fire ‘remains seared in your soul’.footnote⁵ Ofili seems to be offering precisely the ‘healing process’ that Wahabi cautioned against. It has been argued that conventional commemorative monuments present historical episodes as concluded—as firmly in the past, assimilated and uncontentious—and thereby impede rather than enable the process of remembrance.footnote⁶ In this sense, too, Ofili’s mural resembles official memorial art of the past.

Ofili’s frieze is glancing in its treatment of the disaster itself. But we now know a lot about what happened, and why the fire was so deadly.footnote⁷ It started not long after midnight in a fourth floor flat, set off by a malfunctioning fridge, and spread through highly combustible cladding and insulation that had been fixed to the external walls of the 24-storey building during a cut-price refurbishment in 2014–16. From the cladding it then entered flat after flat as windows shattered in the heat, rapidly making its way up and around the building. Successive governments had failed to enhance safety regulations after earlier blazes, such as the 2009 Lakanal House fire. Regulatory bodies, privatized in the eighties and nineties, were ineffective, partly because they worked too closely with the corporations they were meant to regulate. The Whitehall adviser on fire protection, Brian Martin, was keener to cut red tape than improve safety. In this he was following the priorities of the ministers he answered to, notably Eric Pickles at the Department for Communities and Local Government. The manufacturers that supplied cladding and insulation for the refurbishment produced deceptive marketing and gamed the regulatory system. One company sold cladding panels made of sheets of aluminium around a plastic core, though the safety risks had been known since 2004. Of the two suppliers of insulation for the tower, one neglected to inform the British Board of Agrément of failed internal tests, while the other submitted a safer product than the one on the market for fire safety testing. Compounding these failings and abuses, the number of building control inspectors working for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea was slashed during the years of austerity after 2010, and the inspector assigned to the Grenfell Tower refurbishment had no experience of cladding jobs.

Had the emergency call handlers told residents to leave the building in the early hours of the fire, many lives would have been saved. Instead, they followed the fire brigade’s standard policy and instructed them to stay put. A series of technical glitches, including a broken television screen in the control room, hampered the firemen’s work. Repairs to the tower’s malfunctioning smoke control system had repeatedly been put off by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organization, which had a poor record of maintenance and viewed residents with suspicion, particularly those who advocated for better upkeep and attention to safety. No evacuation plans had been drawn up for the tower’s disabled residents, fifteen of whom died that night. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the council of the richest borough in the uk had little interest in the building or those who lived in it. Many, including former Labour mp Emma Dent Coad and lawyers representing the survivors, wondered whether there was a connection between the ethnic composition of the tower’s population and this history of neglect.footnote⁸ Of those who died, 85 per cent were non-white.