Bonington Gallery is delighted to announce layt de kam, a newly commissioned body of film and textile work by multi-disciplinary artist Ibiye Camp, exploring the complex interplay between infrastructure, care, and resilience along the coast of West Africa.
At the heart of the exhibition is a critical reflection on the deployment of temporary power ships off the coasts of various West African cities — an intervention intended to address unstable energy infrastructures and shortages. The title, layt de kam (translated as “light is coming”), evokes both hope and uncertainty, highlighting the precarity of such power solutions while celebrating the enduring strength of coastal communities.
Combining spatial intervention, film and textiles, the exhibition will examine how brutalist infrastructure looms ominously over the intimate and everyday life on the shore. Central to the exhibition is a new film, GLOW, a speculative child’s tale that imagines the arrival of this foreign visitor who brings light. Created using point cloud reconstructions, the trace of the landscape is dependent on illumination, shadows and reflections to create the shapes and forms.
Camp further translates these digital landscapes into tactile form by laser-cutting point cloud stills into Kola Nut-dyed fabric. This process embeds the digital with the material, using concentrated light to cut cloth traditionally used by mothers to wrap their children—an enduring symbol of care and ancestral knowledge.
layt de kam further interrogates the broader geopolitical implications of temporary power infrastructures. Shaped by deregulation, privatisation, and conflict, these systems often reinforce global dependencies rather than fostering self-sufficiency. Drawing on theorist Keller Easterling’s concept of “extrastatecraft,” Camp reveals how non-state actors influence through infrastructure, turning energy access into a site of control.
By transforming disrupted landscapes into material memory, layt de kam offers a powerful narrative of resistance, care, and the entanglement of light, technology, and power.
Sound artist FAUZIA has made the soundtrack to Ibiye’s film GLOW.
Ibiye holds an MA in Architecture from the Royal College of Art, and BA (Hons) in Fine Art, from the University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins. Ibiye’s Thesis project titled Data: The New Black Gold was awarded the School of Architectures Dean’s Prize and was nominated for the RIBA Silver Medal Award.
Ibiye has presented her work at The Sharjah Architecture Triennial titled Rights of Future Generations in 2019 and Triennale Milano The State of the Art of Architecture conference in 2020. She showed in the Istanbul Biennial titled Empathy Revisited in 2020, and MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology’s exhibition titled X is Not a Small Country in 2021 and the 13th Shanghai Biennale titled Bodies of Water in 2021, and London’s Art Festival, Deptford X in 2022. In 2023 Ibiye was included in the Venice Architectural Biennial within the group exhibition Guests from the Future, and in 2024, was included in Unseen Guests, a project organized by Iniva as part of the British Pavilion’s public programme at the 60th Venice Biennial.
Ibiye Camp, Rhiarna Dhaliwal and Emmy Bacharach run a BA Studio titled Digital Native at the Design Academy Eindhoven.