Arch Hades has built her career on a type of mythos. Her name evokes the Greek god of the underworld. Her backstory includes, a British boarding school education, a stint in politics, and a rapid ascent to literary success, and selling her poem Arcadia at Christie’s for $525,000 in 2021. Now she is taking on the art world in Venice.
This May, Arch Hades is set to open Return | Ritorno, a solo exhibition spanning three floors of the Scolette Battioro e Tiraoro di Venezia, a decommissioned church on the grand canal in Venice.
The exhibition draws on the artist’s belief in existentialism, the twentieth century philosophical tradition that holds that individuals are responsible for creating meaning in their own lives. The central claim is that human beings are “thrown” into existence without a predefined purpose, and must therefore make choices that define who they are. It’s this premise that Hades explores in Return, the twenty-two panel painting which lends the exhibition its name and depicts the fleeting nature of human life. It’s clear that, with the time she has left, Hades is determined to do it all.
Below, Emily Burke speaks with Arch Hades about Return | Ritorno.
We’re here today at the Kensington Roof Gardens. Could you tell us a little about the significance of this location, and what your relationship with this place is?
KRG holds a special place for me because it’s where years and years ago we had our graduation party. And I remember being eighteen on that warm summer evening, looking at my year group and thinking ‘I don’t have to see any of these people ever again unless I want to.’ Suddenly, my whole life stretched out in front of me and for the first time I could decide where to go, what to do, and who to spend time with. And it was wonderful.
You’ve described the Venice Biennale as “the Olympics of the art world.” What significance does this moment hold for you?
The only thing that tames ambition is desired results, so it’s an honour and a privilege to have my solo exhibition run alongside Koyo Kouoh’s In Minor Keys presentation in the Arsenale, conceptualised to have “a poetic, sensory, and contemplative framework centered on quiet resistance and healing.” I am so moved and compelled by this curatorial framework and hope that visitors experience some overlapping themes in my show, which is asking people to take a closer look at our delicate human condition through multi-sensory experiences infused with my poetry. It really is an honour to be exhibiting in Venice, one of my favourite places on earth, not only during the Biennale, but during one of the most anticipated iterations in years.
With such a major moment on the horizon, how are you feeling?
It is my most ambitious project to date and I have enjoyed every moment of preparation even when it has been challenging.
You haven’t experienced any moments of doubt? Or nerves?
Yes, and no. I’m not a very spontaneous or carefree person. I’ve never worn an anklet in my life. Everything has to be organised and meticulously planned. I’m a planner. So I only experience nerves if I feel like I haven’t planned enough. I sometimes feel like planning an art show is like planning a wedding. Something is going to go wrong, and you just have to be prepared. But I’m feeling pretty good about it because I have such a great team working with me on this, I don’t feel like there are any weak links, which is fantastic.
You talk like an athlete!
Oh my god, I don’t think I have ever been compared to an athlete before, so thank you for that.
I think it was the comment about having “no weak links.” You’re an artist with a game plan.
Now that you’ve said it, I see what you mean. I think essentially that art is a team sport and you have to be a team player.
Your exhibition in Venice is titled Return | Ritorno and references the twenty-two panel painting you’ve created for the show. Does this idea of “returning” relate to your own life and experiences, or are you thinking more in existential terms, about our inevitable return to the earth? I know you’ve previously spoken about your belief in Existentialism.
Yes, this work is about returning our flesh to the earth. It’s our shared inevitable fate. We came from nonexistence, and we all return to nonexistence. St Bede once compared human life to a bird flying from darkness into a brightly lit banqueting hall, and then flying out into the darkness on the farther side.
The idea for the title came to me while I was digging a small grave for a squirrel I called Marcel that died in a traffic accident close to where my studio is. I love the countryside because there’s a lot more life, but you also see a lot more death. And while sometimes you drive past a dead bird or frog on the road and it’s not safe to stop and you just have to repeat to yourself ‘it’s food for the crows’ and move on mentally, when it is safe to pick up a body, I bury it in the earth and say ‘return to the earth, my friend,’ knowing one day too, I will return my loved ones and then a loved one will return me.
Are there any specific texts or philosophies that have inspired this exhibition? I know that Gustav Klimt’s Faculty Paintings (Medicine, Philosophy, and Jurisprudence) were a source of inspiration for this exhibition. Why these paintings? Is it the works themselves, or the controversy that surrounded them?
The works themselves. Klimt is not a major influence in general, but Philosophy made such an impression on me when I saw a life-size reproduction in Vienna that I’ve not been able to forget it. When the Erarta Foundation approached me with the opportunity to have a solo exhibition in a decommissioned church in Venice, I did a site visit and felt inspired by the space to create something similar in an altar triptych structure.
The piece also pays homage to Greco-Roman sculpture. How do you see Greco-Roman sculpture influencing the way you approach the body or form in this piece?
I don’t have a smart or academic answer to this, I am drawn to the aesthetic. It is ancient but also timeless. Looking at sculptures by artists like Bernini makes me pause. And if a visual can silence the voices in my head for a while and dissolve my human condition, I know there’s something special about it even if I can’t quite articulate it. I think it might be that the women have these wonderful curves and are more realistic than the men, who are all incredibly chiselled. There’s this sense of “looksmaxxing” for the men, which is pretty homoerotic, but the women are mercifully left out of it and clinical signs of malnutrition are not yet touted as beauty standards for women and girls.
You mention “looksmaxxing.” Would you consider yourself an extremely online person?
Oh, Emily. Yes. I am chronically online. Although, that being said, I imagine I am as online as most people my age.
I had to buy a physical device recently to limit my scrolling.
It’s a good idea. I think as a society we have to realise that the point of this constant onslaught of fascist propaganda is to exhaust us. You have to stop every now and then and ask who it’s benefitting for us to be consuming the content that we are. And then, obviously, AI is infiltrating our media with so much untruth. We have to keep fighting, and we have to keep resisting. Democracy depends on people waking up and making good choices, every single day. Take breaks from social media, but then come back to trying to make a difference.
Do you believe that art is a meaningful way of making a difference?
Oh my god, 100 percent. Fascists hate art. They hate anything that can make you feel empathy for others. They want to convince people that they are the only bastions of truth, and anything that challenges that, they want to destroy. That being said, while art can nudge people towards shared human experience and empathy, real change is boots on the ground, real change is in policy.
And you’ve done a bit of that too, right?
I worked in politics until I effectively grew disillusioned and had to take a step back. But I know that politics is real power. Politics can kill you, it can kill your children. Art can’t kill anyone, but it can help you live.
For readers who may not be familiar with your story, could you explain how your journey has taken you from politics to poetry and then to visual art? Do you see any common thread that links these different trajectories?
My story begins in failure. My secondary school art teacher lost my GCSE coursework sketchbook, which brought my overall grade down to a B, whereas I got great results in politics, so I decided to pursue something I was excelling in. I took a year out before university to work in Parliament and continued working part-time throughout my PPE degree. The moment I finished my finals I drove down to Westminster to start my full-time job, which I did for some years until I grew disillusioned and decided it was time to try something creative.
The highest reward for making art is you get to make more art. The pivotal moment came when my fourth book Arcadia was illustrated and sold as a digital film at Christie’s for a tidy sum and I was able to set up a home studio. I spent the pandemic writing books and re-training as a painter. I was thirty when I picked up a paintbrush for the first time since my GCSEs. It’s been a journey.
Do you think you would ever produce art that is more explicitly political?
I’ve been pretty explicit about politics in poetry, and I am currently working on a seventh book which is going to be political. There’s a very clear anti-fascist message in there. I find that in poetry and writing, there is less room for interpretation. No one could ever interpret Anne Frank’s diary as being pro-fascism. However, art is far more open to interpretation. So I mostly prefer to address politics through the written word.
That being said, my work for Venice grapples with existentialism, which I find interesting to explore through the lens of cultural neoliberalism that encourages rugged individualism.
What’s become apparent since the start of the pandemic to me, is that a lot of people find the idea that they should have a responsibility and obligation to other people around them as highly oppressive. It seems that every time any adjustment in behaviour or endurance of friction is required for the greater benefit of everyone, people have reacted as if that sort of consideration is the equivalent of stripping them of their rights. It’s been astonishing to witness. Anti-maskers weren’t angry about masks, they were angry about being asked to care about people they have already chosen to ignore.
How do your beliefs in Existentialism shape the way you live your life?
I do my best to live out the three main tenets of existentialism, basically the philosophy that follows through on what it really means to be consistently atheist. And I mean consistently… I’m not the person to talk to about horoscopes.
So first, existence precedes essence. There’s no built-in “human nature” or purpose we’re here to fulfill, because there’s no God who made one for us. We’re completely free to create our own rules and our own reality. And even if that reality turns out to be awful, with credit scores or racism, that’s still on us. We made it, so we’re responsible for it.
Second, freedom is responsibility. I actually find that pretty liberating, because it means anything man-made can be unmade. Nothing is inevitable, everything could be different. Of course, we don’t have absolute free will. We’re often choosing between bad options, but we’re still responsible for our choices. And that responsibility doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
And third, when our choices affect other living beings, there have to be ethical considerations. Right now, I’m really concerned about AI. It can’t be held accountable for its decisions, so we shouldn’t be giving it the power to make decisions that affect living things.
I’m intrigued by your stance on AI. You seem to be an adopter of new technologies. You sold one of your poems Arcadia as an NFT at Christies for $525,000. Why draw the line here?
In terms of Art, Gen AI is a plagiarism machine. Generative AI is competing with people whose work it is trained on and is then robbing them of their livelihoods. The root of Art is feeling and AI cannot feel, it can only steal and regurgitate. Creativity is a process, not an output, not a click of a button.
Let me show you something on my phone, there are long lists of everything I find interesting. News items, thoughts, everything is kept here. Here’s an article about how AI is undermining our democracy: an AI-powered platform generated at least 20,000 emails that helped defeat a proposal to phase out gas-powered appliances in Southern California
Here is a note in my Notes App titled “AI is the asbestos of the internet” – because when you make any comment about the evil of AI on the internet, you inevitably get some people saying, “Ah, but you can’t halt progress.” But you know what else people thought was progress not long after it was invented? Asbestos.
Here’s an article about how Open AI is outsourcing work to Kenya and paying workers just $2 an hour. I keep a record of all of this stuff, because I am disgusted by it and it makes me angry. Anger can be constructive, it can help you to change the world. Ultimately, my stance is that using AI is bankrolling authoritarianism, while it turns our brains into pudding and destroys the environment.
The exhibition will take place in a decommissioned church in Venice. Have you spent much time in the space, and has the architecture influenced the works you’re bringing to the show?
Planning the exhibition and creating the works that will debut in the space meant getting to grips with the intricacies of each floor of the building from early on in the process. I personally measured and re-measured every inch of the space and from there began to think about how interactive, immersive and large-scale paintings, sculptures and installations could be positioned in the space in dialogue with the historic architecture. There is also a sound component to some works which will take on a somewhat eerie, echoing quality given the acoustics of the church.
You’ve described yourself previously as someone who is not only an atheist, but anti-religion. I know you’ve also described your love of Catholic aesthetics, but reject the religion itself. How are you playing with this dynamic in Venice, given that you’re showing your work, which references an altar triptych, in a decommissioned Catholic church?
Yes, my view is that we use all kinds of insidious fiction to avoid accountability for our actions and to oppress others, all under the veil of unquestionable righteousness. But the churches are beautiful, and the costumes and the art, and the incense.
Did you grow up religious?
Return is displayed like an altar triptych, but the subject is not salvation in heaven or condemnation in hell, none of that is real, it’s just something elites made up to subjugate others. My subject is just death. The central panel represents the void, black, empty, apathetic nothingness. By contrast, the sixty three larger-than-life-size figures represent a ‘river of life’ force that depicts a range of human experiences, which speaks to the exhibition’s central philosophical stance: the brevity and insignificance of human life in the grand scheme, countered by the insistence on living fully and meaningfully during our time on earth.
I went to a religious school. I remember this specific moment, when we were learning about the fact that Mary was only around thirteen or fourteen years old when she was impregnated by God with Jesus, and of course, children can’t consent. I was thirteen years old, and I had this moment of realisation that this was a system which was set up to excuse pedophelia and abuse. That’s when I became obsessed with the notion of accountability, and eventually, existentialism.
Were there any texts that were formative in your discovery of this philosophy?
I read a lot at boarding school, it was a real outlet for me. That’s when I discovered early existentialist works like Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, that really struck me. And of course, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which is the absolute… I was going to say bible, but that’s a terrible word for it. It’s a fundamental foundational text of feminism and existentialism.
Do you ever think your life would be easier if you did believe in a God?
It’s always easier and that’s why people do it. It is so much easier to ask for and gain forgiveness from a fictional body than to apologize and do right by the people you’ve actually hurt.
This idea of God’s judgement, and heaven and hell, is such a harmful way to avoid accountability. There’s this promise of the afterlife, this promise of hypothetical accountability, this promise of justice, but conveniently, this all happens after you’re dead.
Do you hope that this body of work confronts or comforts the audience?
I hope that it will confront viewers, and then comfort them. The main takeaway is that one day, you will die. But right now, you’re alive. So the question is, what are you doing with your life? What are you doing with your time?
With existentialism in mind, do you think your role as an artist is to create meaning or expose its absence?
I like to put quite specific meanings into my work. I like everything to have a clear story, but I think what’s fantastic about art is that there’s such a range of meanings one can project. Sometimes you take something away from a piece that isn’t what the artist intended and that’s part of the beauty and the mystery of art as well.
You’ve previously spoken about the loneliness you experienced when you first moved to England, which informed your poetry practice. How has your sense of community evolved since then, and in what ways have the communities you’ve found shaped your visual work?
Being a child is already a lonely and frustrating experience and then not being able to communicate with your only peer group on a basic level because of the language and cultural barriers was a struggle. And children can be so malicious, empathy is a learned skill. So one simultaneously retreats inwards to build a mute, inner life, while racing towards learning the language as a means to connect with others.
But in time I found a variety of friends. One of the main reasons I wanted to be a poet and an artist was because I wanted to be a part of those communities. And the poetry community is a wonderful, safe space. I say this a lot, but I’ve never come across a poet I didn’t get on with. The art world I’m still getting to know.
You’re very specific about the meaning in your art works. Can you tell us a few small details/pieces of symbolism to look out for in your Venice exhibition? Something you wouldn’t want our readers to miss.
In one of the sculptures, titled Rain, I pay tribute to The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí, with a puddle formation that looks like it’s dripping down the plinth. I borrow a lot from Surrealism. Another sculpture in the show, titled Isle, renders gravestones in the shape of books, because that’s where poets ‘bury’ their loved ones. Poems are like gravestones, marking where love lies. I hope people recognise my handwriting within these sculptures. There’s so much of the self in cursive. In the twenty-two panel, thirteen-metre wide painting, titled Return, I reference a number of my favourite sculptures, from The Rape of Proserpina by Gian Lorenzo Bernini to The Three Graces, symbolising sorority. I also painted myself among this cacophony of bodies.
While you’re in Venice, are there any other shows you’re keen to see, or any artists whose work you’re excited to engage with?
I am always interested in performance art and painting so I’m especially excited for Marina Abramović and Jenny Saville’s big solo shows. I like Nigel Cooke’s large-scale, figurative but abstract paintings and Alfredo Jaar’s subversive use of text to invert problematic hierarchies, so I am also very much looking forward to seeing how their work is featured in the context of the main exhibition of the Biennale, In Minor Keys.
Are there any bars, restaurants or locations in Venice that you’ll be visiting when you need a break from the art world?
I love to eat to the point where my friends and I plan our vacations around restaurant reservations and many of my favourite restaurants are in Venice: Il Ridotto, Oro, Quadri, Antica Osteria Cera, Trattoria da Paeto, Il Sogno. At Acqua Pazza they do the spaghetti alla nerano that Stanley Tucci loves. Stanley Tucci, perfect man. And it has to be said that one of my favourite spots has to be the Aman Venice, the most beautiful palazzo on the Grand Canal.
