Beckwith Lecture: Johanna Hedva

Join us for the 2024 Leo and Betty Beckwith Lecture with Johanna Hedva, co-presented with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at 230 Fenway. 

Hedva will share excerpts from their newest publication How to Tell When We Will Die. The publication expands upon Hedva’s paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personal—from Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with America’s byzantine healthcare system, and considering archetypes they call The Psychotic Woman, The Freak, and The Hag in Charge, Hedva offers a bracing indictment of the politics that exploit sickness—relying on and fueling ableism—to the detriment of us all. 

Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches. Hedva’s practice cooks magic, necromancy, and divination together with mystical states of fury and ecstasy, and political states of solidarity and disintegration. They are devoted to deviant forms of knowledge and to doom as a liberatory condition. 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. Whether the form is novels, essays, theory, poetry, music, performance, AI, videogames, installation, sculpture, drawings, or trickery, ultimately Hedva’s work is different kinds of writing because it is different kinds of language embodied: it is words on a page, screaming in a room, dragging a hand through water. 

ASL and CART from Hands in Motion, Boston are available for this program. TUAG strives to make our exhibitions and programming accessible for all audiences. If you have any questions or would like to discuss how to best make a program accessible for you, please email galleryaccessibility@tufts.edu.