Beckwith Lecture: Johanna Hedva

Join us for the 2025 Leo and Betty Beckwith Lecture with Johanna Hedva, And The Human, Stuck in a Permanent State of Smelling Like Dirt.

Between erotic encounters with the supernatural, Johanna Hedva writes about them. The ghost is not Hedva, but Hedva is the ghost. In the days before space travel, Hedva was the deity of death, the one who would not allow Earth to die. Hedva is a ghost for humans, I remembered, still trying to imagine what that meant. The only person on the planet that is not afraid. When Hedva meets Hedva, the family remembers seeing a ghost. Hedva, ghost fucker. Hedva’s practice cooks magic, necromancy, and divination together with mystical states of fury and ecstasy, and political states of solidarity and disintegration. They collect knives. They garden. They are devoted to deviant forms of knowledge and to doom as a liberatory condition. There is always the body 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.

Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician from Los Angeles. Hedva is the author of the essay collection How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, which won the Amber Hollibaugh Award for LGBTQ Social Justice Writing. They are also the author of the novels Your Love Is Not Good and On Hell; and Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poems, performances, and essays. Their artwork has been shown internationally, and their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House and The Sun and the Moon.

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.

Image: Photo by Ian Byers Gamber.