James Webb

James Webb is a conceptual artist, known for his site-specific interventions and installations. His practice often involves sound, found objects, and text, invoking references to literature, cinema, and the conceptualist traditions. By shifting objects, techniques, and forms beyond their original contexts and introducing them to different environments, Webb creates new spaces of tension. These methodologies bind Webb’s background in religion, theatre, and advertising, offering poetic inquiries into the economies of belief and dynamics of communication in our contemporary world.

As Brandon LaBelle writes, “The works of James Webb circulate around a complex mixture of emotional and affective states; of longing and despair, of the ecstatic and of hopefulness, states of bodies and minds that move throughout his practice to raise questions of individuality and community, belonging and displacement, fragmentation and recuperation” (Xenagogue, edited by Anthea Buys, Hordaland Kunstsenter, 2015).

Webb’s solo exhibitions include Let the Darkness Be a Doorway (Galerie Imane Farès, Paris, 2025); tuuui trrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr (MAC/CCB, Lisbon, 2025); See You in Happiness (blank projects, Cape Town, 2025); Slowly slowly and then all at once (Kunsthuset Kabuso, Øystese, 2025); The Moon Will Not Stay Hidden Forever (Liljevalchs, Stockholm, 2024); What Fresh Hell Is This (blank projects, Cape Town, 2020); Prayer (Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, 2019; Art Institute of Chicago, 2018); Choose the Universe (Galerie Imane Farès, Paris, 2019); Three Dreams of the Sinking World (POOL, Johannesburg, 2019); It’s Not What It Looks Like (SPACES, Cleveland, 2018); The dreamer in me meets the dreamer in you (Norrtälje Konsthall, Norrtälje, 2018); Hope is a good swimmer (Galerie Imane Farès, Paris, 2016); ECSTATIC INTERFERENCE (blank projects, Cape Town, 2016); We listen for the future(Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, 2016); Xenagogue (Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, 2015); The Two Insomnias(blank projects, Cape Town, 2014); Audiopolis (CentroCentro, Madrid, 2013); MMXII (Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, 2012); and Untitled States (mac, Birmingham, 2010).

Major group exhibitions include Kunsthalle Mulhouse (2025), MGK Siegen (2025), the Blaffer Art Museum (2024), the Astrup Fearnley Museet (2024), Monheim Triennale II (2023), the International Biennale of Saint-Paul de Vence (2023), the Islamic Arts Biennale, Jeddah (2023), the Mona Foma festival (2023), the 16th Lyon Biennale (2022), the Curitiba International Biennial (2019), the 13th Dakar Biennale (2018), the 4th Prospect Triennial, New Orleans (2017), documenta 14 (2017), the 13th Sharjah Biennial (2017), the 12th Havana Biennial (2015), the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), the 3rd Marrakech Biennale (2009), the Melbourne International Arts Festival (2009), and the 8th Lyon Biennale (2007). He has also exhibited at Museum Tinguely (Basel), A4 Arts Foundation (Cape Town), Wanås Konst and Historiska museet (Sweden), MAXXI (Rome), Darat al Funun (Amman), Théâtre Graslin (Nantes), and Tate Modern (London).

Webb’s work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Tate, the Art Institute of Chicago, MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, MAC VAL, the Iziko South African National Gallery, and the KADIST Foundation.

His projects have been the subject of two monographs: . . . (blank projects, 2020) and Xenagogue (Hordaland Kunstsenter, 2015).