“In terms of performance, sculpture and installation – everything I make begins with language, with poetry,” Hades tells The Wick. “And good poetry comes from radical honesty.”

Painting, on the other hand, begins with a different process for the artist. In her studio, Hades keeps a giant pinboard of images gathered online, artworks she has encountered and photographs taken while travelling, printing them out so that they remain physically present while she works. She traces the method back to Magritte and his habit of collecting postcards, then borrowing motifs that could recur across different paintings.

On Hades’ current board, medieval iconography sits alongside images of works by Francis Bacon. Scraps of old opera scenery appear among birds and Murano chandeliers, while churches in Vienna share space with decrepit Roman statues. As Hades puts it simply: “It’s a vibe.”

Hades’ Champion is Tamsin Hong, a writer and contemporary art curator who is Exhibitions Curator at Serpentine. Hong first encountered Hades through her poetry, including Arcadia from 2022 and poems written as correspondence in 2020.

“In these works, Hades uses language to explore the tensions and hopes in the midst of the pandemic and consumer culture. Language and poetry also form a cornerstone of her performance piece ‘Happening’ (2026) which imagines the next phase as the information war brews and fascism takes over.

What intrigued me about her one-woman performance was how she inhabited each character, as though exploring how we are all complicit in creating the conditions for fascism to fester. Either through our distribution of misinformation on social media, our consumption of it, or our apathy towards it, Hades embodied a range of characters we can readily recognise as accelerating to the terrifying next chapter.”

Hong sees this concern with language extending across Hades’ different forms of making, particularly in the way words circulate through contemporary media.

“Across a range of platforms, the artist demonstrates the pervasive power of language, particularly the spoken word, as it continues to spread across televised, web and social media. As such, her exploration of the spoken, performed and written word anticipates the complexities of our near future and provides us with the opportunity to think through how we will respond. The urgency of her work, though difficult to experience, helps us sift through a crisis before it appears.”