In this lecture artist Johanna Hedva will reveal insights into her book-in-progess The Mess, in which she describes her first encounter with masculinity and mysticism through the music of Nine Inch Nails. NIN's guitarist Robin Finck had an important influence on Johanna Hedva in terms of genderqueer mysticism.
,,Robin Finck, NIN’s reclusive touring guitarist, became the first guide I had who pulled me toward becoming the genderqueer mystic I am today. Finck didn’t look like a man or a woman, and he was not quite even human. He fit no rock-star archetype I’d seen, but was something closer to a demon ghost who beckoned me through an inter-dimensional gate. Calling him a mystic is not at all explicit, and it’s taken me years to realize that this was the role he played in my life, that by watching him slip in and out of legibility, I was not necessarily watching an individual, but what was coming through that individual. The task of the hagiographer is to interpret what is unknow-able; this lecture is my attempt at his hagiography.'' - Johanna Hedva
The lecture by Johanna Hedva is a part of the exhibition The Season of Cartesian Weeping curated by Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot for DRAF’s Curators Series #12 (29 October – 8 December 2019). The Season of Cartesian Weeping is a group exhibition that invites 5 artist collectives to reveal their respective methodologies for producing the platforms and conditions necessary for more discursive forms of practice. It is an exhibition that examines the tools and protocols of self-organisation that these collectives depend on, rather than the object based outcomes they produce.
Am Nuden Da
East London Cable
-f-r-i-e-n-d-s– with Mark Aerial Waller
OFFSHORE
Parrhesiades with Johanna Hedva
Johanna Hedva 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. They are the author of the novel On Hell (2018, Sator Press). 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. Their fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Triple Canopy, The White Review, Black Warrior Review, and anthologized in GenderFail and Asian American Literary Review. Their essay Sick Woman Theory, published in 2016 in Mask, has been translated into six languages. Their album The Sun and the Moon was released in March 2019. Two of its tracks were played on the moon. In 2019, they’ve been touring Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House, a drone metal guitar and voice performance influenced by Korean shamanist ritual.
