Ross Simonini Is there a philosophical perspective on death that feels most true to you? Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, published by Sming Sming and Wolfman Books, 2020. Soon after, we began a parallel exchange online, to capture the satisfyingly direct sting of their writing. They were demonstrative and warm in these exchanges, laughing more often than their work would suggest. Over the last few months, Hedva and I spoke multiple times over video chat for the ArtReview podcast Subject Object Verb. Other works include On Hell (2018), a paranoid, profane rant of a novel, and They’re Really Close to My Body (2020), a thoughtful ‘hagiography’ of Nine Inch Nails that treats the band as a kind of mystic saint. In 2016 they published a manifesto, ‘Sick Woman Theory’, in response to a chronic illness that prevented them from engaging in street protests, but offered a new kind of bedridden revolution. Many of these forms are documented in their new collection, Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain (2020, Sming Sming Books), which includes drawings and documentation from performances. Hedva is also a writer who wades into prickly subjects: they court murderous rage, embody internet conspiracy and wax with blowjob poetry. “In one song”, Hedva says, “I feel like I am death itself, in others I am my mother, encountering it.” To convey this, Hedva has studied operatic and Korean pansori singing styles as a way of expressing the binary quality of their Korean- European identity through a single throat.

Hedva’s upcoming album, Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House, is radically different in technique though similarly thick in its mood, a lugubrious fuzz of doom guitars and vocal aching in the form of a eulogy for their mother. Like much of Hedva’s work, the album is a celebration of darkness, an evocation of the swampy zone where the sacred and profane meet. One song repeats the phrase “Man, beauty is so fucking dumb, the fuck” for minutes. They describe this music as ‘Hag Blues’ made ‘for those who feel best in caves’. In 2019, after a decade-long break from making music, Johanna Hedva released the album The Sun and the Moon, a black slurry of rich, harsh noise, industrial beats and grainy samples.

Sick Woman Theory by Johanna Hedva