Johanna Odersky at Hillside
by Luis Schrümpf
Some subjects are conditioned to duality in order to be revealed: The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities is the promise of a continuation Samuel R. Delany announced at the close of his 1984 novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand – a sequel announced and never delivered. What remains is a title, an excerpt of 6,373 words available online, and forty years passed without a resolution. Johanna Odersky’s current show Of Bodies, Of Cities at Hillside reanimates Delany‘s lost sequel and joins a history of references through her continuous exploration of organizational systems and the shapes they adapt as bodies in landscapes. The exhibition is located near Landsberger Allee and tucked away behind clusters of Industrialized apartment blocks which are typical for these parts of East-Berlin. Arriving on site, I find myself wandering through rows of garages and storage units before standing in front of what seems to be the new addition to Hillside, a transdisciplinary project run by Chris Attila Izsák in various forms since 2023. Two garages combined into a tunnel-like passageway, lit by fluorescent tubes suspended from the ceiling enclosed by old wooden gates-opened by appointment for curious strangers and friends.
The first thing I encounter is 6 circles, 20 pairs, 2026-a proto Hoberman Sphere build, as the title implies from 20 scissoring pairs made of 48 folding rules, bolted together on their hinges, installed in six circles. Seemingly frozen mid-way through its isokinetic movement, the sphere sways in space, moved by a soft summer breeze, like a tumbleweed rolling through an urban desert. Stepping inside the exhibition space, two smaller works are installed on the raw concrete walls of the tunnel. Both titled Untitled, 2026, the two works consist of folded and primed squares of canvas, recalling orchids, or paper fortune tellers in shape. They resemble a pair, yet exist independently, mirroring each other's folds in negative. The three artworks are paired with a short excerpt of the only 6373 released words of Delany’s The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities—describing a world addicted to reflection, where every surface throws an image of whoever passes back at them, before arriving, mid-sentence, at a place where all objects are wholly without gloss–functioning as an exhibition text.
Odersky’s nod towards Delany‘s unreleased sequel through the show's title carries quite a tail of references. Richard Howard's foreword to his acclaimed translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (eng. The Flowers of Evil), originates the formulation of “the splendour and misery of cities, of bodies” offered by him as the condition a translator must consent to before the poems will yield anything. Later on it became the title of Delany’s never released work through a trade in hierarchy between bodies and cities. Howard's Formulation echoes Honoré de Balzac‘s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (eng. The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans) through its terminology. The formula of Balzac‘s influential four part novel is a stock one in French, and its content is the single stubborn claim that splendour and misery are not two states but one substance seen from either side. Baudelaire built his Les Fleurs du Mal on the same figure and named its longest section for it Spleen et Idéal (en. Melancholy and Ideal), discussing the interplay of a swing up toward the ideal and the drop back into a heavy, airless boredom, as an oscillation with no rest at either end.
Looking at Odersky’s work up close, the sphere-esque structure of 6 circles, 20 pairs, 2026 loses its outlines entirely and dissolves into undefinable amounts of small measurements pointing in every direction at once, measuring the non- or not yet existing. Stripped of their reference points suspended mid air, the folding rules turn back into an error inhabited in their arrangement as a sphere, inheriting an appetite for total measurement without inheriting its certainty. As measuring space implies mapping it, the potential of a claim arises, but there is nothing to claim here. It remains unclear if the sphere is caught in a state of expanding or collapsing, of tool or sculpture—what it withholds reflects the question back onto whoever stands in front of it, measuring against nothing but their own expectation of measurement.
A similar gesture arises within both versions of Untitled, 2026 which are caught in metamorphosis—neither fully closed within their sculptural qualities nor entirely flat monochromatic paintings. Unlike the sphere made of folding rules, which abstracts its measuring system through the subtraction of reference points and direction, the folded canvas masks its dimensions and folding instructions under a layer of white primer which preserves their stiff shapes and positions them in between mediums.
As the sun sets, the cold hue of the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling becomes more pronounced, turning the whole space into a secluded realm of its own. The momentary threshold between day and night decodes the exhibited works and performs what they've been withholding all along. A sphere caught between expanding and collapsing, isn't undecided so much as it is reaching and retracting at once, held in the same gesture, independent of the measurements along its outlines. The canvases, between opening and closing their folds resolve no more than the last light resolves into darkness through dusk. As I witness the sky holding its silhouette against a setting sun the folds and angles of Odersky’s work remain alike, recalling the interplay of desire and destruction, of ascent and ruin that remained prominent during my visit to the exhibition, through the literary predecessors of its title. Yet these concepts are not to be mistaken as the content depicted by the artworks but the condition of their function–oscillation between physical states, emotional landscapes are held open rather than resolved. The abundance of function for beauty originates from Odersky's earlier exploration of dissonance and harmony in organizational structures and the shapes created when they overlap.
Stepping outside Hillside, night has fallen. The light inside faintly illuminates the bordering storage units leaving the exhibition space suspended in darkness. In consenting to the splendor and misery of bodies, of cities, the undefined in Odersky's work doesn't feel like a lack of substance but a yearning for what has not yet arrived.