For Sequences Festival, Hedva will be debuting songs from their upcoming, in-progress album, Fist. Written on a haunted acoustic guitar that disappeared for ten years and then returned in winter 2023, the songs from Fist materialise as hag blues, succubus folk, and bog-witch lullabies. Hedva’s trademark voice, trained in both traditions of classical opera and Korean P’ansori, finds an uncanny other place in croaking, screeching, growling and screaming, while it slouches toward a serenade. There is doomed lament, dismembered body parts, murderous rage, and of course, ordinary swampy heartbreak with men on their knees.
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. Whether the form is novels, essays, theory, poetry, music, performance, AI, video games, 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 the water.
CAUTION: Performance is very loud. Earbuds will be available.
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.
