Nothing Heals
With Johanna Hedva and Clare Molloy
Increasingly “care” has become a virtue-signal, a sloganised value – but care at an institutional level can be infantilising at best and violent at worst. In their current work, writer, artist and musician Johanna Hedva turns away from the promise of care and fantasy of healing.
- In English; Speech-to-text
Past Dates
Propelled by exhaustion and disappointment from working with institutions, Hedva has found that “not caring anymore” is one of the most liberating positions in relation to institutions. Foregrounding refusal as radical engagement, exhaustion as ontological, and nihilism and pessimism as generative states, Hedva is working toward a position that measures the success of any activism in terms of failure. Hedva’s new body of work scrutinises the seemingly causal relationship between healing and time. Their project proposes a series of questions: What comfort can come from the saying ”time heals all wounds” if both time and healing don’t exist? What about the depth and poetry and hauntedness of qualitative time, cyclical time? What if the clock is always wrong?
Johanna Hedva (they/them) is a Korean-American writer, artist and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives between Los Angeles and Berlin. Hedva is the author of Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain (Sming Sming/Wolfman, 2020), a collection of poems, performances and essays, and the novel On Hell (Sator/Two Dollar Radio, 2018). Their work will be presented in a group show on caring, repairing and healing at the Gropius Bau in 2022.
Clare Molloy is Assistant Curator at the Gropius Bau. Together with Stephanie Rosenthal, she has co-curated exhibitions such as Zheng Bo: Wanwu Council 萬物社 (2021). She also co-curates a group show on caring, repairing and healing which will be presented at the Gropius Bau in 2022.