With The Moon Will Not Stay Hidden Forever, Webb tackles Sweden, Stockholm and Liljevalchs with his site-specific interventions and installations. Some of the artworks visitors will encounter include a Viking sword that transforms through a series of personal questions, an ensemble singing an 873-year-old hymn inside R1’s nuclear reactor hall, flags fashioned after a vision of a saint, and the song of an alien bird in the Blue Gate garden.
Out in the garden between Liljevalchs and Blå Porten, the song of a bird native to Tasmania is heard. Webb’s family were sent to Tasmania as convicts in the early 1900s. The artist’s ancestors probably heard the bird’s song, and by placing the song in Liljevalch’s garden in Webb’s new hometown of Stockholm, a circle of movement through time and space is completed.
James Webb (born 1975 in Kimberley, South Africa) lives and works in Stockholm. In Sweden, Webb’s work has previously been exhibited at Konsthall C (2022), Borås Art Biennale (2021), Norrtälje Konsthall (2018), Historiska Museet (2016) and Wanås Konst (2015). Major group exhibitions include the 8th and 16th Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (2007 & 2022), the 13th Biennale in Dakar (2018), the 4th Prospect Triennial in New Orleans (2017), the 13th Sharjah Biennale (2017), 12th Bienal de la Habana (2015) and 55th Venice Biennale (2013).
