James Webb
Current Review(s)
'One Day, All of This Will Be Yours'
James Webb at blank projectsIn South Africa, James Webb is typically referred to as a sound artist, but in his exhibition, 'One day, all of this will be yours', Webb at times deliberately hides sound. In fact, there is much that he shrewdly conceals.
In his recurring, worldwide sound intervention, 'There’s no place called home', recordings of foreign birdcalls are placed in various local trees (in Japan, China and South Africa) in a gesture of sonic subversion akin to ‘avian graffiti’. The artwork is not the sound, though. The artwork is the hidden sound: sound firstly hidden away in trees unbeknownst to most except perhaps the birds (expanding the ‘audience’ into the animal world), and sound secondly hidden from the gallery goer. The work is simply the photograph and text — the concept — and the concept is about the ‘not-there’.
21 January 2010 - 26 February 2010
Listings(s)
Melbourne International Arts Festival
James Webb at Signal Sound SystemJames Webb will create a new public intervention as part of the 2009 Melbourne International Arts Festival. Utilising the City of Melbourne's SIGNAL speaker system on the Northbank of the Yarra
River, Webb will produce a series of short public service announcements with local voice artists. Appearing authoritative and authentic, these text-based sound works will be fictional and oblique information-style messages; benign but allowing for a certain degree of curiosity and mistrust.
Other artists appearing on the Melbourne International Arts Festival include Peter Greenaway, Janet Cardiff & Georges Bures Miller, Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni, Philip Brophy, Ray Lee and Callum Morton.
Webb's work was curated by Jared Davis, and produced for the Melbourne International Arts Festival with The City Of Melbourne, Signal and RMIT.
12 October 2009 - 25 October 2009
'Berlin: L'effacement des traces'
James Webb at Musée d'histoire contemporaine BDICJames Webb will be exhibiting a new work entitled Ost, on 'Berlin: L'effacement des traces', a group exhibition at the Musée d'histoire contemporaine in Paris. This exhibition seeks to explore how the townscape of this city has been reconstructed and how that which emerges, unexpectedly and often spontaneous, is still evidently linked to the past.
Participating artists include Glen Baxter, Jean Faucheur, Wolf Leo, Lawrence Brun, Rainer Hachfeld, Jean-Claude Mouton, Pinter, Jan Svenungsson, Bernard Plossu, Dominique Treilhou and Gérard Zlotykamien.
The Exhibit is curated by Sonia Combe, Thierry Dufrêne and Régine Robin.
21 October 2009 - 31 December 2009
'Le Marche´ Oriental'
James Webb at KZNSALe Marche´ Oriental documents a two-minute intervention inside Cape Town’s disused Oriental Plaza, an apartheid-era shopping mall designed to control Indian trade. On the 4th day of Ramadan, 2008, Sheikh Mogamat Moerat of District Six’s Zeenatul Islam Majid mosque was invited to sing the Azaan inside the empty remains of the building a few weeks prior to its demolition to make way for luxury apartments. Le Marche´ Oriental was commissioned for the 'Jozi & The (M)Other City Project' curated by Carine Zaayman in August 2008 at the Michaelis Gallery in Cape Town.
20 April 2010 - 02 May 2010
James Webb, Kathryn Smith & Nontsikelelo Veleko on 3rd Arts In Marrakech Biennale
James Webb, Kathryn Smith and Nontsikelelo Veleko at AiM International BiennaleJames Webb, Kathryn Smith & Nontsikelelo Veleko will be showing on the 3rd Arts In Marrakech biennale. The exhibition is curated by Abdellah Karroum and participating artists include Isaac Julien, Adel Abdessemed, Francis Alÿs, Ninar Esber, Naoko Takahashi and Otobong Nkanga.
19 November 2009 - 20 January 2010
'One Day, All of This Will Be Yours'
James Webb at blank projectsJames Webb presents his second exhibition at Blank Projects, a collection of works currently exhibited on 'A Proposal for Articulating Works And Places,' curated by Abdellah Karroum for the 3rd Arts in Marrakech biennale. Of particular interest, due to its relevance to the area where Blank Projects has relocated is Le Marché Oriental. The work documents an intervention in the former Oriental Plaza, where Webb invited Sheikh Mogamat Moerat of District Six’s Zeenatul Islam Majid mosque to sing the Adhan (call to prayer) inside the empty remains of the building a few weeks prior to its demolition to make way for luxury apartments.
The show also acts as an informal off-site finissage to the biennale, and gives viewers the opportunity to see various recent projects conducted by the artist over the last two years.
21 January 2010 - 26 February 2010
James Webb at Kunst Im Tunnel, Düsseldorf
James Webb at KIT Kunst Im TunnelJames Webb's Autohagiography installation, featuring recordings of the artist while under hypnosis, will be exhibited on the group show 'Happy House / Kleine Reparatur Der Welt' at Düsseldorf's Kunst-Im-Tunnel gallery.
Other artists include Tolia Astali, David Hahlbrock, Jakub Nepras and Lucile Desamory.
21 November 2009 - 31 January 2010
'Prayer: Nottingham'
James Webb at Djanogly Art Gallery'Prayer: Nottingham' is a sound installation produced for the Djanogly Art Gallery at the University of Nottingham by Cape Town artist James Webb. It consists of over 45 recordings of prayers from different faith groups from the city of Nottingham, creating a rich aural tapestry of each religion's hopes, desires and entreaties.
26 June 2010 - 08 August 2010
'Aleph'
James Webb at Goethe On MainIn a solo project at the Goethe On Main project space, James Webb investigates the phenomenon of glossolailia in religious experince. Sound recordings of individuals speaking in tongues dominate the exhibition space, and are supplemented by textual material gathered from Webb's interviews with these individuals.
Aleph opens on November 10 at 7.30pm
10 November 2010 - 15 December 2010
'Terms of Surrender'
James Webb at ABSA Gallery'Terms Of Surrender', James Webb's first solo exhibition in Johannesburg, brings together individual projects created by Webb after winning the 2008 ABSA L’Atelier award. The works featured were created in Berlin, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Madrid and Paris over the past three years. The exhibition employs spatial and sculptural elements to create a meditation on territory, history and culture.
The exhibition opens at 6.15pm, and is followed shortly by the opening of Webb's second solo exhibition in Johannesburg at Goethe on Main.
10 November 2010 - 26 November 2010
'Sentences on the Banks and Other Activities'
James Webb at Darat al Funun, The Khalid Shoman FoundationThe exhibition project 'Sentences on the Banks and other Activities' is conceived as an arena for research activities, a project experimenting with display formats and ideal narratives of artworks and their histories. The main room acts as a headquarters, connecting the roads and passages built between the artists’ studios and the surrounding urban mountains. Amman is a city of passage, with a significant number of exiles arriving from surrounding countries plagued by war or endemic conflicts. A constellation of relevant notions is contained in the artworks such as fear, desire, belief, displacement, and social ecology. The project deals with establishing links between 'bordures' (not borders) as well as looking at fixed passages and limits between spaces, disciplines, and conventions.
Originally exhibited as part of 'Sentences on the Banks and Other Activities', curated by Abdellah Karroum, James Webb’s latest neon sculpture has become a permanent fixture in Amman. The work adorns the façade of the new home for the Khalid Shoman Private Collection and can be seen, at night, from many points in the city. The Arabic text translates as There Is A Light That Will Never Go Out.
13 November 2010 - 28 February 2011
'Untitled States'
James Webb at MAC (Midlands Art Centre), BirminghamJames Webb constructs situations that court the imagination. In this, his first substantial exhibition in the UK, Webb introduces the viewer to a collection of works which serve to both reassure and unsettle. Here, in the relative safety of the arts centre, the artist makes a series of interventions to trigger a sense of something happening, something undeterminable, provocative and ultimately disquieting. With a distinctive and subtle application of sound, image and installation, Webb creates an environment in which powerful sensory experiences can occur and the casual encounter can leave a lasting impression.
18 September 2010 - 14 November 2010
