Lina Okafor's studio sits on the top floor of a former textile factory in Neukölln, its windows fogged with the breath of a dozen drying canvases. "I never trust a painting that comes easily," she says, wiping cobalt from her hands.
Her latest series, Salt Routes, traces the maritime histories that carried her grandparents across three continents. Each canvas is built from up to forty translucent layers, a process she describes as "painting with weather."
Painting the diaspora
Okafor resists the label of political artist, though her work is steeped in questions of belonging. "Migration is not a subject for me, it is a grammar," she explains.
I want the viewer to feel the distance a colour has travelled before it reaches them.
That distance is literal: her pigments are sourced from the places her family has lived, ground by hand in the studio.