This post was originally published on artnews.com
No matter how it arrives, disability will arrive for everyone, sooner or later,” Johanna Hedva writes in How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, an essay collection published this past fall. Assembling texts written over the past decade, the 368-page tome makes clear that sickness, in its many forms, is an inherent part of life—and that rather than aiming to “be well,” understanding real “health” leads to embracing and caring for everything that accompanies this indisputable fact.
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Like the genre-bending span of Hedva’s creative practice as a poet, writer, musician, performer, and visual artist, How to Tell When We Will Die examines life and death from a multitude of perspectives, opening up new pathways of thought and posing questions related to everything from disability and anti-racist activism to Greek tragedies, ancient astrology, mysticism, kink, and doom metal. And the book is only part of the story: Beyond it lie two novels, numerous conceptual and musical performances, poetry, two albums, essays about other artists, and installations, drawings, and more. Connecting them all is Hedva’s embrace of the vastness of the world, the uncontainable nature of the human experience, and the sickness, doom, and death that inevitably accompany life.
Hedva was born and raised near Los Angeles. Their parents, they say, were “‘failed artists’ in the sense that they had big ambitions, dreams, and aspirations and a huge amount of creativity and talent.” Their mother was a painter with a studio in the garage, their father, a musician who practiced with a band almost every night, but neither figured out “how to live it every day in a way that was sustainable.”
As a child, Hedva’s creativity was encouraged. One day, around age 14—the same age they came out—Hedva went to school in a self-made gown with a train and objects sewn on it, carrying an umbrella as an accessory. But there were also traumas owing to physical violence, poverty, and neglect, and intergenerational traumas related to their grandparents’ immigration from Korea to the United States. At 16, Hedva’s father kicked them out of the house. “I left a few days after my mother punched me in the head,” they write in How to Tell When We Will Die. “My dad noticed the bruise the next day and, in his typical manner of not really being a father, suggested that I be the one to leave.”
Hedva graduated from high school two years early, and by age 18, after a period of being unhoused, moved into a room of their own. During this time, they took a job at a leftist weekly newspaper, which they now recall as their first education in writing. Hedva wrote about anything and everything—“even Sarah McLachlan concerts,” they said, with a laugh—and learned how to express strong opinions through writing. “It was a good experience because it was low-stakes, and I got published a lot right out of the gate,” they said. They prefer to keep the details vague, however: “Hopefully none of this is available, even for the intrepid.”
Writing has always underpinned Hedva’s practice. When we spoke during the promotion for How to Tell When We Will Die, they explained that they have written at least 500 words a day for 20 years. In Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain (2020), a collection of poems, essays, and photographs and text related to performances, Hedva wrote, “I write as soon as I wake, but it is through writing that I fully awaken.”
For Hedva, the practice of writing developed in their 20s, in tandem with performative works. The Cave (2012–14), for example, was a series of three performances, each involving Hedva and another performer telling stories that revolved around themes of feminism and death, with a healthy dose of humor, in intimate spaces. Around the same time, Hedva also created “The Greek Cycle” (2012–15), four plays they directed and wrote by adapting ancient Greek texts by Euripides and Homer. Each text was reimagined from a feminist and queer perspective, and the plays were performed in different settings in Los Angeles: a hallway at CalArts (where Hedva completed an MFA and MA), a Honda Odyssey, an art space, and a studio apartment in MacArthur Park.
Allusions to ancient Greek culture recur throughout Hedva’s work. There’s a section dedicated to the concept of hubris in How to Tell When We Will Die, and throughout all their work, Hedva namedrops Persephone, Nemesis, Zeus, and Hermes, among others, like the specific type of celebrities they are. “I’m fascinated with Ancient Greece, and it’s not out of reverence,” Hedva told me. “It’s because I think all our problems were invented there.” Xenophobia and the notion of women as slaves trace back to ancient Greece, they said, and continued: “I do not want to hear ancient Athens is the birthplace of democracy. No one could vote except propertied, head-of-household men. They moved society from a matriarchy to a patriarchy. They also took ancient Arabic, Babylonian, Sumerian, Indian, and Persian astrology and consolidated it. When you’re studying ancient Greek astrology, you’re studying a colonial project.”
Performances like those in “The Greek Cycle” are chronicled in Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, which also reflects on the artist’s real-life experiences of having a miscarriage, getting divorced, going through a breakdown during which they stopped speaking and wore earplugs and stayed in bed for two months, and being involuntarily hospitalized. As evidenced throughout their work, the personal is political, and so too is the private. And though the majority of Hedva’s performances took place in contained spaces, they were, like stage plays, labor-intensive endeavors, often with two shows a night for three weeks. At a certain point, this became unsustainable: “I physically couldn’t do it,” Hedva said.
In the mid-2010s, Hedva veered away from performances and put more energy into publishing and work related to music and sound. In 2016, in Mask Magazine, they published “Sick Woman Theory” an essay that reframes disability as not only a biological state but also an inherently social and political condition—one that is enmeshed with what might be called viruses plaguing the world, like capitalism, racism, and sexism. The essay, about a subject Hedva hadn’t previously confronted in their work, was reposted all over the internet, translated into 11 languages, and became a core part of the artist’s practice.
Two years later, Hedva published their first novel, On Hell (2018), an experimental book delving into themes of despair, resistance, and the liminal spaces between life and death as well as fragmented consciousness and collective trauma. Then came an album, The Sun and the Moon (2019), and Hedva’s first solo exhibition, “God Is an Asphyxiating Black Sauce,” at Klosterruine Berlin, a preserved site of ruins of a 13th-century monastery, in 2020.
The show revolved around “Playlist to the Void,” comprising songs from their album, readings from Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, new tracks created by four other composers, and thenunreleased songs from their 2021 album, Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House. All of this coalesced in a soundscape of noise, language, and experimental music that could be experienced at the open-air site or streamed online, where all the audio was also described for Deaf listeners. “Making an exhibition during COVID-19 meant that my primary concern was access,” the artist told Art in America at the time. “I was thinking about how the work could exist in multiple forms, pushing against the ableist notion that art is best experienced in person.”
During this time, Hedva read Fred Moten’s 2013 essay “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)” and Leila Taylor’s 2019 book Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, two pieces that “changed everything about how I think,” they said. “It was the first time I had really thought about blackness—the racial kind of political ethnic identity of blackness and the culture and the meanings around it—as well as nothingness and black as this negation of a color, the politics of negation, which is different than refusal.” Combining these influences with their own experience, Hedva began to circle around darkness, black, death, holes, and trauma. To the present day, they told me, “Black permeates everything I do. I’m sort of like: annihilation, obliteration, nothingness, negation, entropy, the end.”
As exemplified through their performances and writings, Hedva was staunchly “anti-object” for decades. “I took a militant position against the enmeshment of art and capitalism, and I saw this primarily happening in the making of expensive collectibles for the ultra-wealthy to be trafficked and displayed by art institutions,” they once said.
That mindset shifted, however, when Hedva was invited to engage with the Wellcome Collection—a museum and library in London devoted to items “relating to health, medicine, and human experience,” according to its website—for a group exhibition held in 2022 at Gropius Bau in Berlin. Searching through the Wellcome Collection’s holdings, Hedva found a 15th-century papyrus scroll on which researchers discovered traces of ink, egg, plants, vaginal fluid, and blood, leading them to determine that the scroll had been placed over a medieval woman in labor as a form of protection.
To showcase the finding in the exhibition—titled “YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal” and focused on “the politics of health” and “various concepts of care, repair, and healing”—Hedva and the curator worked with conservators to display the scroll in a vitrine with certain temperature requirements and limits on lighting. “All of these conditions had to be met for the object to be shown, and I had this moment of, ‘Oh, objects are like bodies: they deteriorate, they need care, they need support,” they told me, “and, even then, they’re going to disintegrate eventually.”
Inspired by the experience, Hedva also made a new body of work, The Clock Is Always Wrong (2022), featuring kinetic sculptural objects, textile prints, graphic drawings, text, and audio, each of which acted as a kind of clock made with time-telling materials such as honey, ink, hair, and mold. At Gropius Bau, black goo dripped from a handblown hourglass counting down specifically to the end of the exhibition. A series of abstract drawings, or studies of materials, made of ink, watercolor, glue, rainwater, metallic dust, and the artist’s own saliva and hair were also attached to the wall with 22 knives.
“The object, to me, is most interesting when you think about how it deteriorates and what is required to support its existence,” Hedva said. “Objects exist in the space-time continuum—they’re not relics that stand still frozen in time, they’re actually alive.” Also, they added, “to get a knife into a wall of a museum, you need equal parts fury and big dick energy and the utmost care because the public can’t be able to pull it out.”
Certain works from the Gropius Bau show gained new life in Hedva’s solo show “Genital Discomfort” at TINA, a gallery in London, this past fall. The artist reimagined the hourglass described above, for instance, as a large-scale vessel hung from the ceiling with butcher-like hooks and chains, filled with a newly concocted batch of black goo—a pigmented industrial-grade silicone oil—to count down to the end of the show (and ruin the gallery’s carpet in the process). “In order to show that piece more than once,” Hedva explained, “it has to go through a death and rebirth.” The gallery was also bathed in yellow light, perhaps an ode to the use of the color by the artist P. Staff, whose work Hedva praised in an essay titled “What Can Be Seen Farther than Any Color on Earth”; in the same essay, Hedva also cites yellow as their favorite color “because it can be so many different things: toxicity and illness and gold and honey, the sun and the moon.”
Around the time of the show in London, Hedva told me that they too, “would love a little death and rebirth,” alluding to a death calculation made according to their astrological charts. Hedva, who practices astrology both personally and professionally, had predicted their death to occur at age 40.5, which they reached last fall. After a revised calculation, however, they realized they actually don’t expect to die until age 93.8. In any case, as Hedva had recently been telling their astrology clients, “we’re all waiting for the end to come while the end is already happening.” Embracing that ethos themself, Hedva added, “there is no beginning and there is no end—just cycles.”