A series of personal questions addresses to the Lake of Geneva

James Webb has an academic background in religion, theatre and advertising. His artistic practice has been described as an exploration of belief and the dynamics of communication in our contemporary world. He often employs found objects, sound and text as tools for this inquiry.

In his ongoing project, A Series of Personal Questions, Webb poses spoken questions to selected objects or spaces. These interventions may take place live or as sound installations, with speakers positioned in relation to the chosen object. No answers are written, offered or implied. Each question is suspended – left open – before the next one is posed. One outcome of this approach is that the audience may find themselves turning to the object for answers, potentially projecting their own responses onto it.

With this work, Webb suggests that every object is more than the sum of its parts or its symbolic meaning – it has, in a sense, lived through a unique set of experiences. The object is never physically altered, touched only by sound waves. The project offers an encounter, not an imposition of meaning, giving initiative back to the object through the act of questioning. The form of address seeks to honour the object and create a space for it to communicate on its own terms. The questions – and the internal answers they may provoke – serve to reframe the object, challenging conventional exhibition conditions and opening new paths for interpretation, parallel narratives and conceptual possibilities.

For KorSonoR, James Webb presents two new works from his ongoing series A Series of Personal Questions. The first, A Series of Personal Questions Addressed to the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire’s Port Statue, inv. 004261, is a live performance focused on the Port Statue (c. 80 BCE), a remarkable and enigmatic artefact discovered in the late 19^th century in Geneva’s harbour, now held in the collection of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire (MAH). The second, A Series of Personal Questions Addressed to Lake Geneva, takes the form of a sound installation in a public space along the lakeside, inviting reflection on the lake as a vast, living presence.