Performance: Johanna Hedva and Xina Xurner

Thursday, January 25, 8pm at 2220 Arts + Archives
Johanna Hedva and Xina Xurner

JOAN presents an evening of performances by Johanna Hedva and Xina Xurner, in conjunction with If You’re Reading This, I’m Already Dead, the first institutional solo exhibition in Los Angeles by Los Angeles- and Berlin-based artist Johanna Hedva.

Hedva will debut songs from their upcoming, in-progress album, Fist. Written on a haunted acoustic guitar that disappeared for ten years and then returned in winter 2023, the songs from Fist produce a voice that slouches toward a serenade by screeching, croaking, and growling. Dominatrix blues, bog-witch lullabies, succubus folk: There is doomed lament, dismembered body parts, murderous rage, and, of course, ordinary swampy heartbreak with men on their knees.

Xina Xurner will present their cathartic music performance combining DIY and power electronics, mutated vocals, and bad drag to expand ideas about queer and trans femme bodies and cultivate intimacy with otherness. Their music combines a variety of genres (including happy hardcore, industrial, drone metal, and techno), to create sadical and sexperimental noise-diva-dance anthems that evoke a sense of transformation, rebirth, and renewal.

Tickets

Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Hag blues, cave music, mystical doom, intimate metal, and succubus folk are some of the genres that articulate Hedva’s music. Their 2021 album, Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House—a solo electric guitar and voice performance that sluiced through cosmic darkness, the sound of the void, and benthic time—was called “rawboned noise-blues” and “doom-ravaged,” and summoned comparisons to Lingua Ignota, Jeff Buckley, and Keiji Haino. Bandcamp Daily called Hedva’s trademark voice, “part Diamanda Galás, part Korean Pansori singing, part widow wailing at graveside, rising to a gigantic operatic swoop like a vulture arcing slowly in the sky.” Their 2019 EP, The Sun and the Moon, had two of its tracks played on the moon. ArtReview called it “a black slurry of rich, harsh noise, industrial beats, and grainy samples. Like much of Hedva’s work, the album is a celebration of darkness, an evocation of the swampy zone where the sacred and profane meet.” Hedva is the author of the novels Your Love Is Not Good and On Hell, as well as Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poems, performances, and essays. Their work has been shown in art institutions internationally, as well as in the Transmediale, Unsound, Rewire, and Creepy Teepee Festivals. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016, has been translated into 11 languages.

Xina Xurner​ is an experimental music/performance collaboration between Marvin Astorga and Young Joon Kwak. They released their debut album DIE in 2012 and their follow-up, Queens of the Night, was released in April 2018. Xina Xurner will make you sweat. Xina Xurner has performed at events and venues including The Smell, Hammer Museum, Night Gallery, Cool World, Mustache Mondays, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Los Angeles); Smart Museum of Art (Chicago); Maine College of Art; Bath Salts (NYC), the National University of Colombia, Bogotá; Pavillon Vendôme Centre d’Art Contemporain (Clichy, France); Serendipity Arts Festival (Goa, India); as well as performances in Tokyo, Seoul, and Mexico City among others.

Photo of Johanna Hedva by Oscar Rohleder.
Photo of Xina Xurner performance at Human Resources (LA), 2018 by KT Stenberg.