A fence to bring us together

While Alex Opper has practised as an artist for about six years (he lectures architecture at UJ), and has built up an interesting body of work, he doesn't exhibit frequently. But when he does, it's worth taking note.

His works are often conceptual pieces. The amount of thought he puts into each piece means they are deceptively simple, refined and minimalist, and much more intellectually intense than they might first appear.

And they can be poetic, too. For one of my favourites - part of a group exhibition called Time's Arrow at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2010 - he collected the dust that had accumulated over a century on the cornices of the exhibition halls and used it to make a "drawing", a secret history of the building reconfigured, but still mysterious.

Perhaps more directly related to his exhibition Uitval (Unfolded) on at the GIBS at the moment is the landscaping around the Goethe Institut on Jan Smuts Avenue, Johannesburg.

Opper led a student project in 2009 to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall. They knocked down the walls around the Goethe Institut and re-used the bricks to build paths and gardens, replacing a barrier with an open public space - a gift to Johannesburg's urban fabric.

Uitval (Unfolded)'s central piece is an installation of 132 golden palisades suspended along an arcade on the GIBS campus. It hangs there like a giant, linear wind chime dividing the walkway in two.

"I have a fascination for often banal things," says Opper. Palisade, for example.

"Palisade is so banal you often miss it." But it is everywhere.

"Palisades play a huge role in our perception of the city," he says. And once you see it, it becomes clear how it is a sign of a post-apartheid treatment of territory.

"Since the mental barriers of apartheid were dismantled, the physical barriers have sprung up," says Opper.

He says his practice as an artist, however, involves a kind of "architectural undoing" or "unbuilding".

This golden palisade is a provocative, even annoying, barrier in a public space, but also involves an invitation to walk through its strange bars, undoing the division it enforces.

By extension, as Professor David Andrew, who spoke at the opening, said, the installation "introduces possibilities for a different imagining of the city".

That might sound like a rather grand claim, but at one point I was standing with my back to the fence, almost touching it.

I glanced over my shoulder and noticed someone on the other side of it, also right up against it.

Maybe it was nothing, or maybe it was a sign thatUitval (Unfolded) was already undoing our sense of social space.

Uitval (Unfolded) will be on display at GIBS, Johannesburg, until March 26. Opper will offer walkabouts of the exhibition (free to the public) every Wednesday at 1pm to 1.45pm. Tel: 073-188-3266