James Webb’s video installation Three Dreams Of The Sinking World is ripe with overt and subtle allusions to Kubrick’s film, transposing its setting to the Carlton Hotel in downtown Johannesburg. Rather than the American roaring twenties, the ghosts which haunt the corridors and leisure rooms of the Carlton Hotel are tied to another moment of unabashed class consciousness: the height of apartheid’s decadence and global ambition during the 1970s.

This past September, the Art Institute of Chicago gave James Webb’s project, Prayer, its North American debut. Prayer was first exhibited in Webb’s home city of Cape Town in 2000 and has since traveled internationally. This latest installment is the tenth. Willing residents of each host city contribute to the project by letting Webb record their prayers, which represent a variety of faith traditions.

There’s a wry sense of irony that sits somewhat uncomfortably with Webb’s genuine absorption and enjoyment of the occult and mysterious. Perhaps it’s their contrast with his near-mathematically minimalist presentation. Interestingly the realms of Physics and Maths have long been dogged by associations with the occult due to Johann Zöllner’s ‘Transcendental Physics’, a text in which he used the idea of a fourth dimension as a way of explaining the impressive illusions of magician and charlatan Henry Slade in 1879. This example serves to emphasize just how much of our intellectual (as well as emotional) endeavour is abstract and ephemeral. Some (if not all) numbers are imaginary.