Johanna Hedva’s boundary-defying practice incorporates writing, visual art, music, and performance. Ahead of their upcoming show, Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy, at the Center for Art Research and Alliances and the release of a new book, My Knife Collection and Other Subjects of Desire, they talk us through creating work that defies its own containers, their interest in the void, and more.

Kate Blair: We’ve been asking artists about their creative upbringings and beginnings. In one interview, you described books as being the thing that rescued you as a young person and that you knew you wanted to write early on. Could you share more about your relationship to books and writing as a young person? Were there specific books or early writing projects that guided you to writing as a practice?

Johanna Hedva: What’s fun is that keeping time through books and writing makes me feel young because I feel like I continually get reborn and remade by words. I read almost one hundred books a year and spend most of my waking and dreaming life thinking about language. I’ve been writing 500 words a day every day for more than twenty years, and I feel like I’m just now starting to get good at writing.

The writers I love most are the ones I have failed, with great devotion, to finish; in other words, that I get to stay new with, and have more to do with in the future. If I don’t finish your book because I love it, it’s a sign of devotion. My favorites are books that I think are so good that I can’t get past the first few pages for, like, years, but I never stop reading them. I have to put it down and stare into the middle distance and just go, fuck — and this is best when it lasts for decades.

A good example: I am an Elizabeth Hardwick disciple. I keep her essay collections within reach at all times. But her novel, Sleepless Nights, I’ve never finished — and I would put it in my top three favorite novels of all time. For more than twenty years (I think I picked up my copy around 2002), I open it and read pretty far, and then I stop. What’s a more intense word for “savor”? It’s that I want to hoard the pleasure of this. Maybe I’m rationing the ecstasy. Each sentence of that book is an almost offensive accomplishment of perfection. And then there’s another insolently precisely perfect sentence after that.

I just moved to New York City and it’s that late August lush summer thunderstorm weather, and I’m rereading Sleepless Nights again, my dogeared, underlined but unfinished copy, on the subway, and it feels like an unreasonable amount of perfect life has been given to me all at once. Maybe I’ll finish it this time; I am on the subway a lot. But, why would I want to finish someone I intend to love for the rest of my life? 

Kate: I loved How to Tell When We Will Die, and I'm very excited to see you have another collection coming this fall! Can you tell me more about your upcoming book, My Knife Collection and Other Subjects of Desire and how it is in conversation with the pieces at CARA?

Johanna: I’ve been calling My Knife Collection and Other Subjects of Desire an orphanage. It collects fourteen years of lawless, wily short pieces that I did in those years as a writer and divinator for hire. An invitation would come in to write about some subject — music, spirituality, a specific artist, xyz — and I’d be given a word count of, like, 2,000 words, and a deadline of, say, three weeks. The invitations would come from all over, a glossy art world magazine, an experimental literary journal. I’m also an astrologer and have read for hundreds of clients, and it’s similar: a chart comes in, and I’m paid to talk about what I think it means for sixty or ninety minutes.

With these invitations, I had a lot of suitors and I liked saying yes; I was very promiscuous. It was a wonderful way to spend that specific allotment of time: thinking of what I could fit into its container. Which meant, especially with the writing assignments, that I was primarily thinking of how to outfox the container, transform it, smuggle something else in. Can an astrology reading be a poetry lesson? Or a philosophical treatise on free will? In the book, there’s almost an indecency of genre, maybe even a polymorphous perversion of forms: there are spells, fables, curses, omens, seances, devotionals, litanies, pilgrimages, inheritances, and a play. The usual cages for the better behaved — fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essay — are not in use here. My orphanage is for the freaks and misfits.

This relates to the work in my exhibition at CARA, Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy in that the exhibition’s objects and images are all disobedient toward their contents, and immoderate, even glamourous, in what happens to them when I’ve put them to the task of holding time, or pain, or grief, or beauty. I see a certain vanity in the magnificence of their failures. I’ve been saying I’m in my vast and beautiful era as an artist, which required that I give each piece a particular doom: to drain, sag, tangle, fall, expire, exhaust itself.

Kate: Part of the stated aim of your work, and the upcoming CARA show in particular, is to make the void visceral to the viewer. How does the work in your show bring the audience in touch with the void? What impact do you hope it has?

Johanna: Well, I’m just trying to deal with my shinbyeong. Shinbyeong means “spirit sickness” in the Korean shamanist tradition, and I def have it. A shaman’s life is a profound sacrifice toward service, and I have tremendous respect for it; it ran in my family; I regularly see a mudang and have a robust practice as a divinator — but I’ve chosen not to pursue initiation. My shinbyeong gets strongest after a death in the family — it first got me at sixteen. My Korean grandmother died in 2023 after years of Alzheimer’s, and all of this work for the CARA show was made in that wake, with the strongest wave of shinbyeong I’ve so far weathered.

My understanding of shinbyeong is that it feels as though one’s psychic edges have little authority or discretion, and any control of these borders only occurs after years of intensive concentration and study on how to guard them, and almost work with them like a craft, or a material. They are always smeared, blurred, and trespassed by forces and energies that you cannot see, touch, and explain within normative Western systems of meaning. It’s that I have a door just always open to the land of the dead, or the spirit world, or the psychic realm, or the energetic plane — whatever you want to call it.

The terminology interests me less than the trespass. I live in the uneasy fact that what comes through seems to have been there all along, and is probably the strongest, most powerful force in my universe. What else can I do with this invasion than try to be erotic about it?

I suppose this is where the void comes in. I experience it less as an emptiness than as an almost pelagic abundance, an enormous place crowded with everything that has lost the form we mistook for the final one. There’s something quaint to me about believing that, because you can’t see a thing, it has had the courtesy not to be there. It’s not that I want to lead my audience to a comprehension of the void, so much that I’d rather they discover they’ve already been pushed and pulled by its current all this time.

So I make things — art, writing, music — that have the same boundary problem I do. These works of the last couple years, which will be in the CARA exhibition, have particular trouble keeping time, pain, and death in their assigned places. They are campy and absurd and witty about it. They are trying to serve cunt about their deterioration.

Kate: I find it very inspiring how cross- and/or multi-disciplinary your practice is. Are there challenges to working this way, in terms of building a career and audience? Secondly, what are the benefits, creatively or professionally, of working in this way?

Johanna: The challenge is that it demands so much of the audience. I ask probably too much of my audience, and I get that it’s hard for some people to hold on. I am not the artist or writer you come to if you need something cleanly explained or clarified, or repeated in method or form. The poor souls who came to me through “Sick Woman Theory” and then read my novel On Hell! Or who discovered that I’d made a riotous, caterwauling adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, performed for two people at a time inside a Honda Odyssey careening around the Los Angeles freeways. Someone comes to How to Tell When We Will Die, expecting to be disability-101ed, and instead they find an eighty-page section on BDSM, kink, my life as a dominatrix, and my love of wrestling. Naturally, one loses a certain amount of parishioners along the way.

The people who stay seem to understand that the shapeshifting is the practice. I don’t have disciplines; I have appetites. I chase thinking rather than rest in thought. I call my methodology “hermeneutical mischief.” Professionally, this is terrible. I am always broke, and most institutions don’t know what to do with me. Curators and editors tend to be afraid of me, and then discover they like that feeling, but this just makes things awkward. My Knife Collection was universally rejected by the literary world for being “too bizarre.” Yet I am one of the happiest and most prolific artists I know. 

Kate: What’s next — do you have any upcoming projects in the works? Or, alternatively, do you have any dream projects, currently underway or not, that you want to tackle?

Johanna: I’m writing a novel about two trans terrorists and a nun with a Twitch stream. So far, everyone is looking for God, but God keeps verbing out of it.