The Medusa and the Snail is a new body of work propelled, fed, and torqued by jigi 지기. In Korean, jigi 지기 refers to a state of heightened sensitivity to one’s ancestors, a pull from the spirit world to commune with one’s dead, but which often produces physical pain, nightmares, and intense, prophetic emotions and visions. In convergence with multiple orbits of alternative knowledges and systems of meanings,
The Medusa and the Snail is a constellation that follows the laws of a multiverse shaped by jigi 지기: non-linear time, incompleteness, paradoxes, the unknowable, and hauntedness.
As a constellation,
The Medusa and the Snail comprises more than fifty works on paper through associative, rather than causal, forms of meaning. There are four new series of drawings: Japanese Ghosts, Everything I've Inherited from My Mother is Broken, Topologies, and Wart Paintings. There is an archive of Hedva’s dreams held down by stones from the Baltic Sea and accompanied by audio of Hedva reading each dream; a library of books on mathematics, physics, poetry, fiction, and theory; and a zodiacal map of their family as a metonymic cosmos. This is the first time Hedva has exhibited their drawings since 2014. The title,
The Medusa and the Snail, is taken from the 1974 book by biologist Lewis Thomas about the selfhoods found in all living things, particularly warts.
More information
here.
