Ain Bailey: The Jamaica Project

10 Apr-14 Jun 2026

Overview

Move through a deep and expansive exploration of identity and place.

This exhibition of London-based composer, artist, and DJ Ain Bailey, presents her ongoing trilogy of films. Rooted in her biography and relationship to Jamaica, the show culminates in the series’ latest instalment, specially commissioned for the occasion.

For over 15 years, Bailey has worked at the forefront of sonic exploration. Using sound in all its forms, Bailey opens up spaces of grief, loss, resistance and remembering – creating active and radical new models of community, co-production and connection.

Presented in an immersive environment, the exhibition’s newly commissioned work was recorded in Jamaica during the artist’s first visit to the country in 2025. Titled 5C Jacques Road: Part One (2026), after the address in Kingston, where her mother’s family once lived, the viewer travels with Ain on her journey across the island. Unfolding in three parts, footage of everyday scenes and unassuming details is accompanied by a new composition featuring field recordings collected on the way.

The adjoining spaces of the exhibition play host to the two earlier works in the trilogy. Themes of family, history and connection also run through the second instalment, Untitled: Our Wedding (2022); a tender 30-minute film of lingering shots of the photo album of Bailey’s parents’ wedding. These images are intertwined with lines of poetry by Remi Graves and a score by Bailey, that fades, swells and haunts the film.

Version (2021), the trilogy’s first work is a 20-minute sonic work of crescendoing layered notes, static interference, and echoes reverberated to the point of near abstraction – interpreted by writer Taylor Le Melle across three screens of rolling prose. Immersed in this sound are 64 suspended Jesmonite sculptures of Jamaica’s national fruit, the ackee – each representing a year since Jamaican independence gained independence in 1962.

Ain Bailey and Camden Art Centre were shortlisted for the Freelands Award 2023.