Artists

Johanna Hedva

Press release

Failed Poet: New and Early Video Works marks Johanna Hedva's return to TINA, bringing together nine early videos (2013–2019) with a new work, The Vanity of Amnesia Keeps Me Young (2026). At its centre is Failed Poet (2015), a trilogy that Hedva describes as 'the hinge door' that flew open their engagement with video at all. Conceived as a loose, non-hierarchical survey, the exhibition revisits the formative works that established Hedva's moving-image language, at once intimate, mercurial, and possessed by voice, body and text. Not so much a retrospective, Failed Poet... is a spatialised archive where works are encountered across screens, projections and sound, at varying scales and proximities. Their second exhibition at TINA, having inaugurated the gallery in 2024, Failed Poet... offers both a return and a reintroduction. Early works, often less widely seen, are brought into the present as a collective gesture, letting the work build, layer, and spill beyond itself. The result is a cacophony of images, voices and rhythms that resists singular readings in favour of accumulation and encounter. Johanna Hedva (b. 1984, Los Angeles, CA, USA; lives and works in LA, USA and Berlin, Germany) is a contemporary artist, writer, and musician. Across visual art, performance, critical writing, fiction and music, their work deals with ecstasy as much as abjection; erotics as much as disintegration; death, illness, and disability, as much as mysticism, ritual, and political activism. They are the author of the 2018 novel On Hell, and Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poetry, plays, and essays published in 2020. More recently and in 2023 And Other Stories published their novel Your Love Is Not Good and in 2024 their book of critical essays How To Tell When We Will Die; On Pain, Disability, and Doom was published by Hillman Grad Books. Johanna Hedva was included in Art Review's 2025 power 100 list and their 2024 exhibition at TINA, London was selected as one of Art Forum's best shows of 2025. They are also a recipient of the 2026 United States Artist Fellowship awards. Recent solo exhibitions include Genital Discomfort, TINA, London, UK (2024) If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead, JOAN, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Who Listens and Learns, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford (2022); Glut (A Superabundance of Nothing), online video game, Shape, UK (2021); God Is an Asphyxiating Black Sauce, Klosterruine, Berlin (2020) and Reading Is Yielding, parrhesiades, London (2019). Recent group exhibitions include Séance: Technology of the Spirit, Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2025); I Want to Love Us, Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea (2024); Cosmos Cinema the 14th Shanghai Biennial, Shanghai (2023); Like Magic, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2023); Interdependencies, Migros Museum, Zürich (2023); Non performing, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde (2023); SICK, ŠKUC Gallery, Ljubljana (2023); Illiberal Lives, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen (2023); The Noon Sirens, Amant Foundation, New York, NY (2022); Kingdom of the Ill, Museion de Bolzano, Bolzano (2022) and YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal, Gropius Bau, Berlin (2022). TINA is located on the first floor of 191 Wardour Street, London, W1F 8ZE. Unfortunately, there is no lift. The exhibition contains flashing images.