Failed Poet: New and Early Video Works marks Johanna Hedva’s return to TINA, bringing together eight early videos (2013–2020) 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, illn...