Separnation runs at GoetheOnMain, Maboneng Precinct, Johannesburg, until November 17. The artist walkabout takes place on Sunday November 10 at noon. For more information go to www.goethe.de/goetheonmain or call (011) 442-3232
SEPARNATION, the title of architect and artist Alex Opper's first solo exhibition, is " a fusion of separation and nation that speaks about the damage that exists in our society physically, symbolically and racially".
The exhibition, at the Goethe On Main gallery, is made up of several separate but connected pieces that investigate Opper's interest in palisade fencing.
They are described in the text introducing the exhibition as "built expressions that stem from the defensive and separation-driven repetition of palisading".
Opper understands that many people may see palisades as "a banal starting point, but if you look very closely at the city you see how this stuff appears everywhere. And I'm trying to use it to interrogate the clichés and preoccupations of Johannesburg with defence and protection and danger and safety - those simple tropes."
Opper, 41, who heads the University of Johannesburg's master's programme in architecture, grew up in Pretoria but relocated to Berlin in 1995. H is decision was motivated by an interest in trying to know more about his German father' s origins.
South Africa was basking in its first decade of freedom while the earnest and intense Opper was experiencing Berlin's transformation in the first decade after the fall of communism.
He obtained a master's degree in architecture and worked on the exhibition design for Documenta 11 before returning to South Africa in 2006. He chose to live in Johannesburg.
"It was the only place I could imagine living in. The rest of the cities in South Africa are too small and kind of dull, in a way."
Opper's outsider perspective of the city allowed him to see it with fresh eyes. It was also a way of looking that was informed by his architectural background.
"As an architect, there's a kind of equal blessing and curse of analysing everything in the built environment and criticising and asking, because there's a curiosity about space and why things look the way they do or don't look the way you think they might or should."
While teaching at the University of Johannesburg, Opper developed a body of work in different mediums.
It examined ideas around territory and delineation in Johannesburg and was presented in group shows
At Goethe On Main, the first thing you see when you walk into the gallery is a floating triangle made up of palisade fencing struts suspended from the ceiling. As we walked around and through the piece, Opper noted that although this was the largest piece and the one that you met first, he did not necessarily classify it as "the most important piece".
"It's a ready-made object. The colour is essentially gold. I bought these off the shelf - 132 of them - and I had them coated in this colour, which shimmers between cyan and magenta.
"When you walk in they face you, so your gut feel is that you're on the outside of the fence. But then, of course, you can walk into the enclosure. So it plays with those binaries of inside and outside, belonging and exclusion."
In the far corner facing the street, threads have been embroidered on a screen to form the same fence outline as those in the exhibition's photographs. Curtain Wall, reflecting the colours of the rainbow, is intended to provide a point of interaction between the gallery and the life of Main Street behind it.
It is the interaction between public spaces that has been central to Opper's thinking. It is an idea that he calls "productive leakage, allowing the space of the museum to allow the museum space to 'leak' into the life outside, breaking down the separation between the two".
At his artist walkabout on Sunday November 10, Opper will extend the concept with the introduction of a piece that mysteriously will exist only for that day.
