Artist Walkthrough: Johanna Hedva

Please join us Saturday, December 9 from 5-6pm for a walkthrough with Johanna Hedva. Their solo exhibition of new work, If You’re Reading This, I’m Already Dead is on view through February 3.

Hedva will guide us through each work in their installation and discuss the considerations of the project’s process, and where the research is pointing next. Expect lucubratory peregrinations about the audio sonifications of space phenomena, the mystical and political capacities of AI, the kinds of submissions in jiu-jitsu, Tesla coils, the Saros Eclipse Series cycle, why three Metal Zone guitar pedals in a row is hilarious, how to use a urethral sound, Karen Barad and why lightning is trans, what lunar moths mean in witchcraft, and how cool the color black is.

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. Hedva’s practice cooks magic, necromancy, and divination together with mystical states of fury and ecstasy, and political states of solidarity and disintegration. They are devoted to deviant forms of knowledge and to doom as a liberatory condition. There is always the body — its radical permeability, dependency, and consociation — but the task is how to eclipse it, how to nebulize it, and how to cope when this inevitably fails. 

Hedva is the author of the 2023 novel Your Love Is Not Good, which Kirkus called a “hellraising, resplendent must read,” and Harry Dodge called “a major achievement.” Their nonfiction collection How To Tell When We Will Die will be published by Hillman Grad Books in 2024. They are also the author of Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poetry, plays, and performances; and the novel On Hell. Their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House and The Sun and the Moon.

Their work has been shown in Berlin at Gropius Bau, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Klosterruine, and Institute of Cultural Inquiry; The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; the 14th Shanghai Biennial; Migros Museum in Zürich; Performance Space New York; Gyeongnam Art Museum in South Korea; Modern Art Oxford; the LA Architecture and Design Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon; and in the Transmediale, Unsound, Rewire, Sequences, and Creepy Teepee festivals. Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, Topical Cream, Mousse, Spike, and is anthologized in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016, has been translated into 11 languages.

Credits 
AI Images: Johannes Beck and Hedva

Photo by Tyler Oyer.

Photos by JOAN.