Home at last ...

Just as a traveler unpacks precious memories, photographs, reports and letters once he arrives back home, so this exhibition by Alan Alborough represents the end of a journey in art.

The journey started last year at the Grahamstown festival where Alborough presented this installation for the first time as the Standard Bank Young Artist of 2000. From there the exhibition moved to Port Elizabeth, Pietermaritzburg, Durban, Bloemfontein, Cape Town and now Johannesburg.

This many faceted and multidimensional art event can also be compared to a journey. The exhibition illuminates the nature and essence of contemporary art.

It refers to the theatrical, interactive and spectacular elements of installation art, the emphasis on recycling in modern society, the use of unexpected materials in contemporary art, the relationship between art and science, the intuitive game in the concept of the artwork and the use of new media by artists.

This diverse exhibition presents the viewer with a wide, diverse and challenging variety of possible explanations.

The artist prefers not to explain or title the work - the viewer is invited to decide, participate and, in the process, leave the exhibition enriched.

This is not asking too much, because the exhibition is wide open to interpretation.

The viewer's first reaction to these strange "sculptures" is one of amazement. With closer inspection they consist of transparent washing pegs, syringes, coils with metal nails and plastic mats as bases. The shapes, reminiscent of Lego constructions, are illuminated from within by neon lights.

The shapes glow in the semi-darkness like space ships awaiting take-off. Plastic containers filled with used batteries are scattered here and there. On the walls hang sheets of nonwoven fabric showing rust patterns.

The beautiful constructions form only part of the exhibition and can also be described as art machines.

The artist uses them to create further artworks by placing metal nails, which are sunk into the coils, in salt water and attaching them to batteries to release rust stains through positive and negative energy.

Each construction contains a sheet of nonwoven fabric, which receives the rust stains to create new art works. The big light sensitive sheets of paper, each depicting an account of the process, hang like tapestries throughout the gallery as witnesses of a concept that was carried through.

The exhibition still does not end here. The silent artist has placed a computer in the gallery on which the viewer can follow the exhibition's progress from Grahamstown to Johannesburg.

The opening speech, the artist's earlier artworks, reviews published in various newspapers and essays by academics make further interpretations available to the viewer. Thus the exhibition ultimately becomes a magnificent experience that entertains and captivates like an art carnival, but also provokes strong reactions.

The linguist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva describes the word "carnival" as follows: "It is a spectacle, but without a stage; a game, but also a daily undertaking; a signifier, but also a signified ... The scene of the carnival, where there is no stage, no 'theatre', is both stage and life, game and dream, discourse and spectacle."

Much can be written about this exhibition, but its value lies rather in one's personal experience of it.