Regardless of the way it arrives, incapacity will arrive for everybody, ultimately,” Johanna Hedva writes in Inform When We Will Die: On Ache, Incapacity, and Doom, an essay assortment revealed this previous fall. Assembling texts written over the previous decade, the 368-page tome makes clear that illness, in its many varieties, is an inherent a part of life—and that somewhat than aiming to “be nicely,” understanding actual “well being” results in embracing and caring for the whole lot that accompanies this proven fact.
Just like the genre-bending span of Hedva’s artistic apply as a poet, author, musician, performer, and visible artist, Inform When We Will Die examines life and dying from a large number of views, opening up new pathways of thought and posing questions associated to the whole lot from incapacity and anti-racist activism to Greek tragedies, historic astrology, mysticism, kink, and doom steel. And the ebook is just a part of the story: Past it lie two novels, quite a few conceptual and musical performances, poetry, two albums, essays about different artists, and installations, drawings, and extra. Connecting all of them is Hedva’s embrace of the vastness of the world, the uncontainable nature of the human expertise, and the illness, doom, and dying that inevitably accompany life.
Hedva’s 2024 ebook Inform When We Will Die: On Ache, Incapacity, and Doom.
Courtesy Hillman Grad Books, Los Angeles
Hedva was born and raised close to Los Angeles. Their dad and mom, they are saying, had been “‘failed artists’ within the sense that they’d massive ambitions, desires, and aspirations and an enormous quantity of creativity and expertise.” Their mom was a painter with a studio within the storage, their father, a musician who practiced with a band nearly each night time, however neither found out “find out how to dwell it every single day in a approach that was sustainable.”
As a baby, Hedva’s creativity was inspired. In the future, round age 14—the identical age they got here out—Hedva went to high school in a self-made robe with a prepare and objects sewn on it, carrying an umbrella as an adjunct. However there have been additionally traumas owing to bodily violence, poverty, and neglect, and intergenerational traumas associated to their grandparents’ immigration from Korea to the USA. At 16, Hedva’s father kicked them out of the home. “I left a couple of days after my mom punched me within the head,” they write in Inform When We Will Die. “My dad seen the bruise the following day and, in his typical method of not likely being a father, steered that I be the one to depart.”
Hedva graduated from highschool two years early, and by age 18, after a interval of being unhoused, moved right into a room of their very own. Throughout this time, they took a job at a leftist weekly newspaper, which they now recall as their first schooling in writing. Hedva wrote about something and the whole lot—“even Sarah McLachlan concert events,” they stated, with amusing—and realized find out how to categorical sturdy opinions by way of writing. “It was expertise as a result of it was low-stakes, and I received revealed lots proper out of the gate,” they stated. They like to maintain the main points imprecise, nonetheless: “Hopefully none of that is out there, even for the intrepid.”
Writing has at all times underpinned Hedva’s apply. Once we spoke through the promotion for Inform When We Will Die, they defined that they’ve written no less than 500 phrases a day for 20 years. In Minerva the Miscarriage of the Mind (2020), a set of poems, essays, and pictures and textual content associated to performances, Hedva wrote, “I write as quickly as I wake, however it’s by way of writing that I totally awaken.”
A scene from Hedva’s play Motherload, 2012, from the sequence “The Greek Cycle,” 2012–15.
Courtesy Johanna Hedva
For Hedva, the apply of writing developed of their 20s, in tandem with performative works. The Cave (2012–14), for instance, was a sequence of three performances, every involving Hedva and one other performer telling tales that revolved round themes of feminism and dying, with a wholesome dose of humor, in intimate areas. Across the similar time, Hedva additionally created “The Greek Cycle” (2012–15), 4 performs they directed and wrote by adapting historic Greek texts by Euripides and Homer. Every textual content was reimagined from a feminist and queer perspective, and the performs had been carried out in several settings in Los Angeles: a hallway at CalArts (the place Hedva accomplished an MFA and MA), a Honda Odyssey, an artwork house, and a studio house in MacArthur Park.
Allusions to historic Greek tradition recur all through Hedva’s work. There’s a bit devoted to the idea of hubris in Inform When We Will Die, and all through all their work, Hedva namedrops Persephone, Nemesis, Zeus, and Hermes, amongst others, like the particular kind of celebrities they’re. “I’m fascinated with Historic Greece, and it’s not out of reverence,” Hedva instructed me. “It’s as a result of I believe all our issues had been invented there.” Xenophobia and the notion of ladies as slaves hint again to historic Greece, they stated, and continued: “I don’t need to hear historic Athens is the birthplace of democracy. Nobody might vote besides propertied, head-of-household males. They moved society from a matriarchy to a patriarchy. In addition they took historic Arabic, Babylonian, Sumerian, Indian, and Persian astrology and consolidated it. If you’re learning historic Greek astrology, you’re learning a colonial undertaking.”
Performances like these in “The Greek Cycle” are chronicled in Minerva the Miscarriage of the Mind, which additionally displays on the artist’s real-life experiences of getting a miscarriage, getting divorced, going by way of a breakdown throughout which they stopped talking and wore earplugs and stayed in mattress for 2 months, and being involuntarily hospitalized. As evidenced all through their work, the private is political, and so too is the non-public. And although the vast majority of Hedva’s performances came about in contained areas, they had been, like stage performs, labor-intensive endeavors, usually with two reveals an evening for 3 weeks. At a sure level, this grew to become unsustainable: “I bodily couldn’t do it,” Hedva stated.
Within the mid-2010s, Hedva veered away from performances and put extra power into publishing and work associated to music and sound. In 2016, in Masks Journal, they revealed “Sick Girl Principle” an essay that reframes incapacity as not solely a organic state but in addition an inherently social and political situation—one that’s enmeshed with what could be known as viruses plaguing the world, like capitalism, racism, and sexism. The essay, a couple of topic Hedva hadn’t beforehand confronted of their work, was reposted everywhere in the web, translated into 11 languages, and have become a core a part of the artist’s apply.
Two years later, Hedva revealed their first novel, On Hell (2018), an experimental ebook delving into themes of despair, resistance, and the liminal areas between life and dying in addition to fragmented consciousness and collective trauma. Then got here an album, The Solar and the Moon (2019), and Hedva’s first solo exhibition, “God Is an Asphyxiating Black Sauce,” at Klosterruine Berlin, a preserved web site of ruins of a Thirteenth-century monastery, in 2020.
Hedva’s 2019 album The Solar and the Moon.
Graphic Mark Allen
The present revolved round “Playlist to the Void,” comprising songs from their album, readings from Minerva the Miscarriage of the Mind, new tracks created by 4 different composers, and thenunreleased songs from their 2021 album, Black Moon Lilith in Pisces within the 4th Home. All of this coalesced in a soundscape of noise, language, and experimental music that could possibly be skilled on the open-air web site or streamed on-line, the place all of the audio was additionally described for Deaf listeners. “Making an exhibition throughout COVID-19 meant that my main concern was entry,” the artist instructed Artwork in America on the time. “I used to be eager about how the work might exist in a number of varieties, pushing in opposition to the ableist notion that artwork is finest skilled in individual.”
Throughout this time, Hedva learn Fred Moten’s 2013 essay “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism within the Flesh)” and Leila Taylor’s 2019 ebook Darkly: Black Historical past and America’s Gothic Soul, two items that “modified the whole lot about how I believe,” they stated. “It was the primary time I had actually thought of blackness—the racial sort of political ethnic identification of blackness and the tradition and the meanings round it—in addition to nothingness and black as this negation of a coloration, the politics of negation, which is completely different than refusal.” Combining these influences with their very own expertise, Hedva started to circle round darkness, black, dying, holes, and trauma. To the current day, they instructed me, “Black permeates the whole lot I do. I’m type of like: annihilation, obliteration, nothingness, negation, entropy, the top.”
As exemplified by way of their performances and writings, Hedva was staunchly “anti-object” for many years. “I took a militant place in opposition to the enmeshment of artwork and capitalism, and I noticed this primarily taking place within the making of pricy collectibles for the ultra-wealthy to be trafficked and displayed by artwork establishments,” they as soon as stated.
That mindset shifted, nonetheless, when Hedva was invited to have interaction with the Wellcome Assortment—a museum and library in London dedicated to gadgets “referring to well being, medication, and human expertise,” in line with its web site—for a bunch exhibition held in 2022 at Gropius Bau in Berlin. Looking out by way of the Wellcome Assortment’s holdings, Hedva discovered a Fifteenth-century papyrus scroll on which researchers found traces of ink, egg, vegetation, vaginal fluid, and blood, main them to find out that the scroll had been positioned over a medieval girl in labor as a type of safety.
To showcase the discovering within the exhibition—titled “YOYI! Care, Restore, Heal” and centered on “the politics of well being” and “numerous ideas of care, restore, and therapeutic”—Hedva and the curator labored with conservators to show the scroll in a vitrine with sure temperature necessities and limits on lighting. “All of those circumstances needed to be met for the thing to be proven, and I had this second of, ‘Oh, objects are like our bodies: they deteriorate, they want care, they want assist,” they instructed me, “and, even then, they’re going to disintegrate ultimately.”
Element of an object from Hedva’s set up The Clock Is At all times Unsuitable, 2022, at Gropius Bau, Berlin.
Courtesy Gropius Bau, Berlin
Impressed by the expertise, Hedva additionally made a brand new physique of labor, The Clock Is At all times Unsuitable (2022), that includes kinetic sculptural objects, textile prints, graphic drawings, textual content, and audio, every of which acted as a sort of clock made with time-telling supplies similar to honey, ink, hair, and mould. At Gropius Bau, black goo dripped from a handblown hourglass counting down particularly to the top of the exhibition. A sequence of summary drawings, or research of supplies, made from ink, watercolor, glue, rainwater, metallic mud, and the artist’s personal saliva and hair had been additionally hooked up to the wall with 22 knives.
“The article, to me, is most attention-grabbing when you consider the way it deteriorates and what’s required to assist its existence,” Hedva stated. “Objects exist within the space-time continuum—they’re not relics that stand nonetheless frozen in time, they’re truly alive.” Additionally, they added, “to get a knife right into a wall of a museum, you want equal components fury and massive dick power and the utmost care as a result of the general public can’t be capable to pull it out.”
View of Hedva’s exhibition “Genital Discomfort‚” exhibiting All Concern Is Erotic (with Ron Athey), 2024, at TINA, London.
Photograph Corey Bartle-Sanderson/Courtesy TINA, London
Sure works from the Gropius Bau present gained new life in Hedva’s solo present “Genital Discomfort” at TINA, a gallery in London, this previous fall. The artist reimagined the hourglass described above, as an illustration, as a large-scale vessel hung from the ceiling with butcher-like hooks and chains, full of a newly concocted batch of black goo—a pigmented industrial-grade silicone oil—to rely all the way down to the top of the present (and damage the gallery’s carpet within the course of). “With the intention to present that piece greater than as soon as,” Hedva defined, “it has to undergo a dying and rebirth.” The gallery was additionally bathed in yellow mild, maybe an ode to using the colour by the artist P. Workers, whose work Hedva praised in an essay titled “What Can Be Seen Farther than Any Colour on Earth”; in the identical essay, Hedva additionally cites yellow as their favourite coloration “as a result of it may be so many various issues: toxicity and sickness and gold and honey, the solar and the moon.”
Across the time of the present in London, Hedva instructed me that they too, “would love somewhat dying and rebirth,” alluding to a dying calculation made in line with their astrological charts. Hedva, who practices astrology each personally and professionally, had predicted their dying to happen at age 40.5, which they reached final fall. After a revised calculation, nonetheless, they realized they really don’t count on to die till age 93.8. In any case, as Hedva had just lately been telling their astrology shoppers, “we’re all ready for the top to come back whereas the top is already taking place.” Embracing that ethos themself, Hedva added, “there isn’t any starting and there’s no finish—simply cycles.”
