Latest Shape collaboration: In 2021, Johanna Hedva was selected for the Adam Reynolds Award. Through the commission, they created 'GLUT', an online video game.

Artist Statement: 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. Hedva’s practice cooks magic, necromancy, and divination together with mystical states of fury and ecstasy. There is always the body — its radical permeability, dependency, and consociation — but the task is how to eclipse it, how to nebulize it, and how to cope when this inevitably fails. Ultimately, Hedva’s work, no matter the genre, is different kinds of writing, whether it’s words on a page, screaming in a room, or dragging a hand through water.

Hedva is the author of Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain (Sming Sming/Wolfman Books 2020), which collects a decade of work in poetry, plays, performances, and essays; and reached #2 on the Small Press Poetry Bestseller List. Their novel On Hell (Sator Press/Two Dollar Radio 2018), was named one of Dennis Cooper’s favorites of 2018. Their work has been shown in Berlin at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Klosterruine, and Institute of Cultural Inquiry; 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. Hedva has written about the political and mystical capacities of Nine Inch Nails, Sunn O))), and Lightning Bolt; the legacy of Susan Sontag; Ancient Greek tragedies; and the revolutionary potential of illness. Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, Lithub, Die Zeit, Ignota, and is anthologized in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016 in Mask, has been translated into 10 languages, and their activism toward accessibility, as outlined in their Disability Access Rider, has been influential across a wide range of fields. Their next book, a novel called Your Love Is Not Good, will be published by And Other Stories Press in 2023.

Their album The Sun and the Moon was released in March 2019; two of its tracks were played on the moon. Their new LP, Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House, a doom-metal guitar and voice performance influenced by Korean shamanist ritual, was released 1 January 2021 on crystalline morphologies and Sming Sming.

'Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain', by Johanna Hedva, 2020.

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Banner Image: 'GLUT', 2021, Johanna Hedva. Screenshot from game play of GLUT. A white, gruesome looking avatar in the shape of a brain or mangled organ crawls its way through black emptiness. Above it, white text reads: the night is precisely the place where we perish interminably and yet can