Johanna Hedva (yo-haw-nuh head-vuh) is a Korean-American writer, artist, musician, and astrologer, 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. 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. Ultimately, Hedva’s work, no matter the genre, is different kinds of writing, whether it’s words on a page, screaming in a room, or dragging a hand through water.
Hedva is the author of the novel On Hell (2018), which was named one of Dennis Cooper’s favorites of 2018. Their next book, Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poems, essays, and performances that documents a decade of work from 2010-2020, will be published by Sming Sming and Wolfman in September 2020. Their first solo exhibition, God Is an Asphyxiating Black Sauce, is open 20 June - 3 August 2020 at Klosterruine Berlin. Their work has been shown at The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Performance Space New York, the LA Architecture and Design Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon. Hedva has written about the political and mystical capacities of Nine Inch Nails, Sunn O))), and Lightning Bolt; the legacy of Susan Sontag; Ancient Greek tragedies; and the revolutionary potential of illness. Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, and is anthologized in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016 in Mask, has been translated into six languages, and their practice and activism toward accessibility, as outlined in their Disability Access Rider, has been influential across a wide range of fields.