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yo-haw-nuh head-vuh
they/them/their
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. Whether the form is novels, essays, theory, poetry, music, performance, AI, videogames, installation, sculpture, drawings, or trickery, ultimately Hedva’s work is different kinds of writing because it is different kinds of language embodied: it is words on a page, screaming in a room, dragging a hand through water.
Hag blues, cave music, mystical doom, intimate metal, and succubus folk are some of the genres that articulate Hedva’s music. Their live performances are as much a cathartic grief purge as a droned-out metal colossus that summons the holy spirit. They are informed by the Korean tradition of Pansori singing, which demands rehearsal next to waterfalls in order to ravage the vocal cords, as well as Keiji Haino, Sunn O))), Jeff Buckley, Diamanda Galás, and Sainkho Namtchylak.
Their latest album, Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House, was released on crystalline morphologies and Sming Sming, on January 1, 2021. It is a solo electric guitar and voice performance that sluices through cosmic darkness, the sound of the void, and benthic time.
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.”
Their work has been shown in Berlin at Gropius Bau, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Klosterruine, and Institute of Cultural Inquiry; in Los Angeles at JOAN, HRLA, in the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time, and the LA Architecture and Design Museum; in London at TINA, Camden Arts Centre, The Roberts Institute of Arts, and The Institute of Contemporary Arts; in New York City at Amant Foundation and Performance Space New York; in South Korea at Seoul Museum of Art and Gyeongnam Art Museum; the 14th Shanghai Biennial; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zürich; Modern Art Oxford; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bolzano; the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon; and in the Transmediale, Unsound, Rewire, and Creepy Teepee Festivals. Hedva has written about the political and mystical capacities of Nine Inch Nails, Sunn O))), and Lightning Bolt; the legacy of Susan Sontag; how everything is erotic therefore exhausting; and the revolutionary potential of illness. Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, Topical Cream, Spike, Die Zeit, and is anthologized in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016, has been translated into 11 languages.
