Johanna Hedva’s “Failed Poet: New and Early Video Works”

This presentation of eight films makes a very deliberate cacophony. Some are presented with headphones, but in most cases the sound bleeds across screens and projections placed low on the wall and at eye level. The installation resonates with, and amplifies, the disorientating effect of short videos such as Odyssey Odyssey (2013), a joyride through Los Angeles with Hermes and Odysseus on the run from a drag queen Kalypso, and Sick Witch (2016), in which a pain-stricken Johanna Hedva groans out the names of medical symptoms. This dissonance serves to upset both the authority of words, and the authorities that language stands in for.

In Odyssey Odyssey—a film of a play staged in the car, with two of the passengers as spectators—Odysseus pukes as he comes off Kalypso’s spell, while Hermes calls her a “cunt” over the phone. Her contact photo is a vulva, or “lower mouth” as the Greeks called it, deeming female double-mouthed-ness the epitome of kakophony.1 The performance is dangerous and unruly, breaking every wall. Hedva riffs engrossingly, in a way that—aside from caricaturing archaic gender norms—immerses us in the maelstrom of reinvention, with the film’s intensity hinging on the sense that anything might happen at any moment.

Hedva’s most recent film relocates that waywardness to the body. In The Vanity of Amnesia Keeps Me Young (2026) we see their naked shoulders, throat, and jaw as they stuff their mouth with a lotus, while a guttural trill is heard in the background. Overlaid captions relate the “lotus-eaters” episode from Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of the Odyssey, in which some of the journeymen eat a plant that makes them forget their destination—home—a psychedelic uprooting in tune with Hedva’s break with narrative convention. This ritualism suggests the negative theology of mystical writing (a neither/nor dialectic headed towards ecstatic nothingness), while there is something self-sacrificial about how they appear—visually at least—to offer up their body.2 Beckett’s transcendent Not I (1972) comes to mind, with words replaced by retching.

Mystical negation lends itself to Goth melodrama. Hedva’s face-shrouding hair in Sick Witch offers one form of self-effacement, as do their droning guitar solos (in one film, from 2020, we see them performing in a derelict church). Negation frames the voiceover of The word for body left my body (2019) which, screened on a wall-mounted iPhone, follows Hedva along a woodland path: “I sat in the graveyard for a few minutes. I have been here forever.” In the slideshow Failed Poet (2015), lines flash up from Simone Weil’s theorization of the Iliad.3 The imperfect alignment of flashing words and Hedva’s vocalized lecture on classical rhetoric is (deliberately) headache-inducing.

One film, however, presents “decreation”—as Weil called it—of a more poignant kind.4 Untitled (Somebody Cheating Me) (2022) homes in on Hedva’s grandmother who, with late-stage Alzheimer’s, repeatedly reads aloud medical letters in different rooms of her apartment. The film is an inversion of the others, bestowing dignity on someone whose self is deteriorating, allowing her to affirm that she worked at a hospital for thirty-three years. This affords crucial nuance to Hedva’s overall program, which is as much as a dismantlement of scripts as a commentary on the belief that we require one in order not to disappear.