Artist Walkthrough: Johanna Hedva
Oct. 18, 2025, 2 p.m.
Gallery 51
51 Main St. North Adams, MA
On Saturday, October 18th at 2:00 pm, artist Johanna Hedva will lead a walkthrough of their installation on view in Ecologies of the In\between at Gallery 51. They’ll move through new works on paper and sculptural pieces made with fish hooks, goose feathers, luna moths, urethral sounds, a fake pelvis, a magnifying glass, glue, chains, needle, and thread. Traces of internet slang, the global supply chain, and the murky, electric boundary between life and matter course through the objects, impelling them into half-alive beings. Hedva will speak to the processes of charging what’s inert, of listening for the hum in what appears dead. An experiment in raising the dead from the sweatshop sublime, Hedva will speak to the uncanny divination that capitalist algorithms conjure—sorting desire, predicting need, delivering ghosts.
Johanna Hedva (b. 1984) is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician from Los Angeles. Hedva is the author of the 2024 essay collection How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, which won the Amber Hollibaugh Award for LGBTQ Social Justice Writing. They are also the author of the novel Your Love Is Not Good, which Kirkus called a “hellraising, resplendent must read,” and the novel On Hell, which was named one of Dennis Cooper’s favorites of 2018. In 2020, they published Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poems, performances, and essays. Their artwork has been shown in Berlin at Gropius Bau, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 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, 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; MASS MoCA; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bolzano; and in the Transmediale, Unsound, Rewire, and Creepy Teepee Festivals. Their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House (2021) and The Sun and the Moon (2019). Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, Topical Cream, and is anthologized in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016, has been translated into 11 languages. In 2024, they were a Disability Futures Fellow, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
