Johanna Hedva

After a chance encounter with Johanna Hedva's On Hell video at ICA London, I researched their practice and discovered to my great delight that they had just released an album entitled The Sun and the Moon. Upon listening to the featured track, Beauty (feat. Simone Weil), I felt that same unsettling sense of humour and dark absurdity that I had recognized in the video. The Sun and the Moon comprises eight distinct tracks, each tuned to its own sonic logics in relation to the others, but which nevertheless hold together as an organic whole within affective zones of echoic resonance or vibrational reverberance.

Hedva writes that The Sun and the Moon is “for those who feel best in caves” — but also for those who feel at home within “a galaxy of bits and pieces.” Both ring true, and not only because the songs viscerally shape such spatial experiences through their effects. Across the eight tracks, Hedva has assembled a kaleidoscopic chorus that represents an extraordinary variety of voices with whom they have been in contact and conversation with — as much a work of autotheory as audio composition. Thus spinning upon an intertextual axis that gathers sound and speech from the likes of Simone Weil, Sun Ra, James Joyce, Giambattista Basile, a nine year-old explaining the universe, Charles Bukowski, June Carter Cash, Alvin Lucier, The Mills Brothers, and many others, the meticulously arranged songs conjure an apparitional dimension of humanity that is often hallucinatory, even numinous, in effect.

Hedva skillfully interweaves their own verbal and non-verbal vocalizations through many of the tracks, ranging from barely audible whispers and glitchy stutters to ethereal harmonies and banshee-like screams, melding them within ever-shifting melodies and rhythms constructed from a wild array of electronic and analogue bits and blips, fuzz, broken piano tones, screeches, silence, and beats. In materializing such radical polyphony, The Sun and the Moon evokes the cavernous aurality of our personal and collective histories, memories, and dreams, through which it becomes possible to grasp the galactic capacities for wonder and connection that we small humans have within.

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The On Hell poster series was created by Johanna Hedva in collaboration with Mark Allen especially for this exhibition. Produced as a varied limited edition of four screenprinted designs, each features a different text excerpt from Hedva's 2018 novel On Hell, as well as ink drawings the artist made during the process of writing it. Two of the layouts feature an added layer of colourful foils in Allen's signature blobby forms. The pale pink paper they are printed on, and the typeface used for the text excerpts matches the colour and typography of the On Hell publication. The typeface is Cholla Wide, named for a species of cactus found in the Mojave Desert and designed by Sybille Hagmann in 1998-99 for the Art Centre College of Design in Pasadena; both cactus and college are local to Los Angeles where Hedva was born and raised.

The screenprints are available for purchase.

All proceeds benefit MEDICAL AID FOR PALESTINIANS, courtesy the artist.

100 USD / 87 EUR / 125 CAD per set of 4 different prints

30 USD / 27 EUR / 40 CAD per single print (limited quantities)

Colours and quantities vary; purchasers of sets may choose from the available prints.

Please contact infinitedistance@anotherbeautifulday.ca to view all available prints and to arrange purchase.

Shipping not included; local Toronto pickup available.

As with all of the On Hell works, these prints contain explicit language and imagery in the form of excerpts from Hedva's 2018 novel transcripts of the excerpts in each print are available upon request.

Individual screenprint titles are as follows:

• 1. Yo yo hey ya my name is fuckall and I'm a wallet
• 2. But to pull out my money and lay it across the counter. Like taking out my dick and laying it across a face
• 3. The whole body was a genital
• 4. Two eyes and a sack of guts swimming in blood and pain and ambition and frustrated exasperated dreamshit

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Infinite Distance originates in an encounter with this text-based video by Johanna Hedva in the 2019 exhibition, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker at ICA London. Loosely structured around eight of Acker’s key works, that exhibition featured cut vinyl excerpts that ICA curators positioned as “catalysts for a network of interconnected materials” that were presented around them. Hedva’s work was installed in the section devoted to Empire of the Senseless, Acker’s fifth book from a major publisher and first venture into science fiction. Playing with access conventions relating to captioning and text-to-speech technologies using an excerpt from their 2018 novel, On Hell, Hedva’s cherubically pink, typographically playful, and laughingly foul-mouthed AI-voiced video struck me with its hilariously profane yet melancholic quality.

Set in the not-so-distant future — a future that could easily coincide with the one in which Acker’s own protagonists (Empire’s part-robot Abhor and wanna-be pirate Thivai) weave their ultraviolent ways — On Hell is named for Hedva’s main character, a recently imprisoned hacker named Rafael whose online handle is not coincidentally a homonym with “angel” (as pronounced in Spanish, Rafael’s native tongue). In interviews with a person he affectionately calls Motherfuck, Rafael/On Hell reveals plans for his next harrowing escape. This time, however, he’s jailbreaking gravity itself — no metaphor, as the plan calls for a diabolical form of body modification (viscerally described by Hedva with an exquisite literary precision).

Speaking on the novel around the time of its release, Hedva clarified the stakes: “On Hell is my attempt at a 21st-century version of Icarus, from a crip perspective. I tried to take on Icarus’ themes of ambition, courage, failure, and gravity through the lens of ‘crip time.’ Crip time is … both queered and disabled … time that isn’t productive, successful, or counted as valuable in a commercial market sense. When time is not regulated by capitalism, and more than that, is actively fucking up such ‘regularity,’ we have to ask different questions about meaning and value.”

It’s also an attack on surveillance, the prison- and medical-industrial complex, and the desire for freedom — not just from an oppressive society, but from the weight of the body, and the Earth itself. On Hell’s solution to the “regime of gravity” is extreme, but not so far gone as to alienate his interviewer, whose flickering perspective on him lends the book gravitas of another dimension. As Rafael’s communications become increasingly cryptic and unresponsive, Motherfuck breaks her silence, begins to respond — evidence of an unlikely, self-surprising concern that perhaps forms the basis for an incipient kind of care for that most distant other, previously deemed unreachable or unredeemable. In simply listening, even — or especially — to those who may on the surface seem unfathomable or even wholly unsound, what might re-sound for us, might amplify possibilities for a more courageous kind of care?

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Ten years ago it seemed possible to destroy language through language: to destroy language which normalizes and controls by cutting that language. Nonsense would attack the empire-making (empirical) empire of language, the prisons of meaning. But this nonsense, since it depended on sense, simply pointed back to the normalizing institutions.… Thus an attack on the institutions of prison via language would demand the use of a language or languages which aren't acceptable, which are forbidden. Language, on one level, constitutes a set of codes and social and historical agreements. Nonsense doesn't per se break down the codes; speaking precisely that which the codes forbid breaks the codes.

— Kathy Acker, from Empire of the Senseless

Johanna Hedva is an accomplished writer and reader who has conceived and produced a wide range of works in relation to libraries, literature, and reference works across their multidisciplinary and deeply intertextual practice. Before the pandemic, when this exhibition was being planned for physical space, we were discussing possibilities for the display of Hedva's novel, On Hell, in the curatorial library, and lit upon the idea of offering complimentary copies to visitors as part of a participatory exchange. A bookshelf display of Hedva's distinctive pink paperback volumes would thus be transfigured over time into an eclectic collective library as a natural extension of their bibliophilic, citational, and collaboratively-based practices. In considering the criteria for what might merit a suitable exchange, Hedva wished to highlight the joyfully transgressive spirit of their protagonist’s voice and use of language throughout the novel, with its liberal deployment of the word "fuck" in its many and varied forms.

Pushing against conventions of acceptability and performative morality, such transgressive strategies in fact go far beyond mere glee and gratuitousness, evincing a fearless commitment to and belief in the need to constantly question the standards, norms, and logics of conformity and oppression that our society has come to consider as natural and necessary forms of control. One only needs to see the list of books that have been burned or banned throughout history (and more recently, as a web search for “critical race theory” and “US schools” will quickly demonstrate) to understand the importance of such challenges to the status quo. Not content to merely limn the absurd levels of repressive violence we often mindlessly perpetuate as a species, works such as On Hell and The Motherfucker Library are urgent calls to action, through which dominant strategies of policing difference in thought, belief, embodiment, and expression may continue to be exposed and dismantled.

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