Johanna Hedva

Maruja Mallo. Máscara y compás: Catálogo bilingüe de la exposición sobre Maruja Mallo en el Museo Reina Sofía. Recoge su trayectoria artística y su influencia en el arte contemporáneo.

At an otherwise forgettable party in Los Angeles, a queer Korean American painter spots a woman who instantly controls the room: gorgeous and distant and utterly white, the centre of everyones attention. Haunted into adulthood by her Korean fathers abandonment of his family, as well as the spectre of her beguiling, abusive white mother, the painter finds herself caught in a perfect trap. She wants Hanne, or wants to be her, or to sully her, or destroy her, or consume her, or some confusion of all the above. Since shes an artist, she will use art to get closer to Hanne, beginning a series of paintings with her new muse as model. As for Hanne, what does she want? Her whiteness seems sometimes as cruel as a new sheet of paper.When the paintings of Hanne become a hit, resulting in the artists first sold-out show, she resolves to bring her new muse with her to Berlin, to continue their work, and her seduction. But, just when the painter is on the verge of her long sought-after breakthrough, a petition started by a Black performance artist begins making the rounds in the art community, calling for the boycott of major museums and art galleries for their imperialist and racist practices.Torn between her desire to support the petition, to be a success, and to possess Hanne, the painter and her reality become more unstable and disorienting, unwilling to cut loose any one of her warring ambitions, yet unable to accommodate them all. Is it any wonder so many artists self-destruct so spectacularly? Is it perhaps just a bit exciting to think she could too?Your Love Is Not Good stuffs queer explosive into the cracks between identity and aspiration, between desire and art, and revels in the raining debris.

A book for the moment and for the ages. Its questing, pissed, propulsive, funny, generous, pervy, and originalfull of love and pain in all their entwined glory. Maggie Nelson, author of The ArgonautsWINNER OF THE AMBER HOLLIBAUGH AWARD FOR LGBTQ+ SOCIAL JUSTICE WRITINGThe long-awaited essay collection from one of the most influential voices in disability activism that detonates a bomb in our collective understanding of care and illness, showing us that sickness is a fact of life.In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to ask: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you cant get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, Sick Woman Theory, became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalisma system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodieswe must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others.How to Tell When We Will Die expands upon Hedvas paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personalfrom Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with Americas 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 sicknessrelying on and fueling ableismto the detriment of us all.With the insight of Anne Boyers The Undying and Leslie Jamisons The Empathy Exams, and the wit of Samantha Irby, Hedvas debut collection upends our collective understanding of disability. In their radical reimagining of a world where care and pain are symbiotic, and our bodies are allowed to live free and well, Hedva implores us to remember that illness is neither an inconvenience or inevitability, but an enlivening and elemental part of being alive.