Artists are not clairvoyants, but sometimes their work can obliquely anticipate the future. Take Cape Town artist James Webb, who in 2013 worked with 10 male vocalists to create a Xhosa recording of T-Rex's 1972 song Children of the Revolution.Premiered on curator Brenton Maart's South African Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, the work was underwhelming. It existed as sound decoration in a cluttered exhibition. Whatever potency it had as an idea was entirely latent.The difference context makes. Last week about the time a group of students at UCT expressed a very visceral form of art criticism, burning paintings removed from halls of residence, Webb's recording was replayed from an eccentric speaker stack installed in the vacant Trubok clothing factory in Salt River.The playing slotted into a sequence of performances and displays organised by Mary Corrigall, Amy Watson and Nelisiwe Xaba under the banner of their Live Architecture: the 55-Minute Hour exhibition programme.On the face of it, Webb's sound installation is still whimsical. The campy lyrics to the glam rock classic he repurposed with conductor Bongani Magatyana were never intended as a dissertation on social unrest."I drive a Rolls Royce/ cos' it's good for my voice/ But you won't fool the children of the revolution," goes a part of the song in English.Yet there was an undeniable symmetry between the promise of the choir in Webb's recording and the actions of the revolutionary children at UCT, whose ranks included Eskom CEO Brian Molefe's son Itumeleng."The symmetry is spooky," said Webb. "I think it's an interesting game when artworks can be lenses for events."Webb, whose solo exhibition Ecstatic Interference is on in Cape Town at Blank Projects in Woodstock, told how a neon work he created in 2010 in Amman, Jordan, was later repurposed to speak to social events in that region.His outdoor light piece spelt out the Arabic phrase, "Hunaka doo la yantafy," which means "there is a light that never goes out".Webb, a former band leader, was invoking a 1986 song by the English rock band The Smiths.These coded references didn't trouble a feminist group in the Arab region, who appropriated his work without credit for their Facebook cover image.On the subject of strange symmetries, the key work in Webb's solo exhibition is a rectangular speaker stack replaying an 18-minute recording of nine percussionists drumming on wood and steel doors.This untitled work is Eskom-proof: it is powered by 12 solar panels on the gallery's roof for the duration of the show.James Webb's Ecstatic Interference is on at Blank Projects in Woodstock, Cape Town, until March 5..