Johanna Hedva: Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain

Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain collects a decade of work from artist, muscian, and author of On Hell, Johanna Hedva. In plays, performances, an encyclopedia, essays, autohagiography, hypnagogic, and hypnapompic poems—texts whose bodies drift and delight in form—Minerva tunnels into mysticism, madness, motherhood, and magic. Minerva gets dirty with the mess of gender and genius. She does the labor of sleep and dreams. She odysseys through Los Angeles, shapeshifting in stygian night and waking up to wail in the light.

The audiobook is narrated by Johanna Hedva and features tracks from Anja Kanngieser, Geneva Skeen, Pauline Lay and Gabie Strong, and William Fowler Collins. 

“Can an artist’s personal history of their performances be a history of performance art? Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain traces both a decade of Johanna Hedva’s performed works and the edges of that genre’s history: bringing the intimate, fearful, feminine, traumatized, queer, and real-life-lived to look and admire and poke at the assumptions about what performance art has been: genius, unreachable, masculine, and hermetic. Hedva is both a wonderful writer in the school of Helene Cixous, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Clarice Lispector: and like them, a creator of spaces we didn’t know that we’re allowed.” 
—Alexandra Grant

“A book about viscera and black ash; ‘Blood and guts… soul and tears.’ Dark matter and sea foam blessed by ‘the tentacles of sea plants when they move…’ This is the literature of THE VOID. I will treasure Minerva as I do the most revelatory writings of Artaud.”
—Lara Mimosa Montes, author of Thresholes

Johanna Hedva is a Korean-American writer, artist, musician, and astrologer, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. They are the author of the novel, On Hell (2018). Their work has been shown at The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Performance Space New York, the LA Architecture and Design Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon. Hedva’s writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, and The White Review, and is anthologized in the Documents of Contemporary Art series by Whitechapel. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016 in Mask, has been translated into six languages. Their albums are The Sun and the Moon (2019) and Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House (2020).

Second Edition:
October 2022, English, 5 x 8 in, 196 pages, b&w, softcover