The Houses Of The Serpent Bearer, The 12th House

»The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.« [1] In the 12th house of the cycle, the exhibition series „The Houses Of The Serpent Bearer“ presents wall pieces and a sculpture by the visual artist and musician Johanna Odersky along with the video work Rompers by the Tokyo-based artist Motohiko Odani. With their vibrant colours and recurring, curved forms, the works seem fun and vivacious, intensified by the cheerful soundtrack of the looping video. Yet at the same time, the subliminal feeling that something is wrong and weird slowly creeps in. »The sense of wrongness associated with the weird — the conviction that this does not belong — is often a sign that we are in the presence of the new. The weird here is a signal that the concepts and frameworks which we have previously employed are now obsolete.« [2] The duo exhibition by Odersky and Odani invites to a parallel universe, which shifts our notion of reality. Johanna Odersky‘s Time Keeper in the entrance area keeps the past, present and any possible future, thus providing a portal to another place where the concept of time no longer applies. We encounter the familiar, yet it appears strangely modified. Dancing and twirling confetti, a pair of scissors (Johanna Odersky, Newfound Instincts, 2019) celebrate their queerness and liberation from their passive existence as objects. »(...) the eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all? These questions can be posed in a psychoanalytic register — if we are not who we think we are, what are we?« [3] A mutation may have taken place, appearing in various forms. For example, Odani’s Rompers shows a girl sitting in a tree singing a song when she suddenly swallows a passing insect with her chameleon tongue. Her yellow reptile eyes try to hypnotise the viewer, while her head bobs innocently to the beat. Although the frogs grow a human ear on their backs, they circulate blithely around the pond – much like the sculptural scissors whirling around themselves. Also, the flies in Rompers are constantly forming a curved Moebius Eternity in the air. This shape reoccurs in Odersky‘s wall works, indicating an endless renewal and holistic perception. Formally, they are primarily inspired by baroque dance notations, which themselves somewhat function as a „time keeper“ by recording past events, predicting the future and influencing the present. [4] »scores have enabled us to reach out to other people, even across cultural and language barriers, and tell them what we would like to have happen. scores have made it possible, as well, for us to say to someone else what happened to us.« [5] The formations or scores within the works of both artists communicate what our language system cannot capture. Instead, a rewriting of codes takes place, creating space for new narratives and storytelling. The supposed binarity of inside and outside dissolves, as does the human self-conception of identity and corporeality. Instead, like the scissors, we celebrate the grotesque, bizarre twists and the new weird. »(...) it is the human condition to be grotesque, since the human animal is the one that does not fit in, the freak of nature who has no place in the natural order and is capable of re-combining nature’s products into hideous new forms.« [6] Text by Pina Bendfeld [1] Mark Fisher, The Weird And The Eerie, 2016, p. 26 [2] ibid., p. 21 [3] ibid., p. 17 [4] Lawrence Halprin, RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment, 1970 [5] ibid. [6] Mark Fisher, The Weird And The Eerie, 2016, p. 77 – 78