Galerie Imane Farès - Paris

Let the darkness be a doorway brings together three works produced between 2024 and 2025. Together, they continue James Webb's exploration of the invisible, the sacred, and the nuclear. Knowing The Ways is an immersive sound installation created in the former R1 nuclear reactor beneath Stockholm. A choir performs five of the Virtues from Hildegard of Bingen's Ordo Virtutum (1151): Humility, Love, Fear of God, Mercy, and Hope. The voices rise and resonate through the site's underground architecture, captured by sixteen microphones. Six loudspeakers, mounted on scaffolding that appears to support the gallery, transmit these shifting echoes, enveloping visitors in a dialogue between spirituality and science, the subterranean and the celestial. The figure of Hildegard of Bingen reappears in The Tongue Is A Flame | The Flame Is A Tongue, a banner inspired by one of her mystical visions, as depicted in the Scivias manuscript (1151). Originally presented as a flag, a new version of this motif in banner form is shown. These visions—later interpreted as migraine auras—resonate with James Webb's own experience, as he also lives with these neurological phenomena. A poetic video work completes this triptych: a static shot of shimmering light on the surface of Tranbärssjön, an artificial lake created in the former Ranstad uranium mine in Sweden. The sun's reflections visually evoke the sparkles and distortions caused by a migraine aura—a subtle fusion of industrial memory, intimate biology, and altered perception.

On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, James Webb presents his work Untitled (9th August), created in 2005 during his residency at CCA Kitakyushu, Japan. Deeply moved by his visit to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, Webb was struck not so much by the objects on display as by the descriptive texts—mostly in Japanese, with a few translated into English. These fragments of narrative, both laconic and evocative, left a lasting impression on him. For this installation, Webb copied fifty of the English captions onto individual museum cards. This minimalist approach lends each description weight and gravity, allowing the surrounding emptiness to resonate with the absence—or spectral presence—of the vanished objects.