Saturday, October 3, 5pm PDT / 8pm EDT

Please join us for a virtual book launch of Johanna Hedva’s new collection of poems, essays and performances, Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain. Copies are available to purchase through Sming Sming and Wolfman Books.

The event will take the form of a reading with musical performances by Hedva and Los Angeles-based musicians Pauline Lay and Gabie Strong. Closed captions will be available. Because Hedva is based in Berlin, the q&a will be prerecorded. Please submit any questions to hannah@joanlosangeles.org by Friday, September 25.

Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain collects a decade of work from artist, musician, and author of On Hell, Johanna Hedva. In plays, performances, an encyclopedia, essays, autohagiography, hypnagogic, and hypnapompic poems—in 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.

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), and their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, and Die Zeit, and is anthologized in the Documents of Contemporary Art series by Whitechapel. Their work has been shown in Berlin at Klosterruine and the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 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. 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).

Pauline Lay is an instrumentalist, composer, and events organizer in Los Angeles. Apart from her solo improvised violin and electronics performances, she currently performs and collaborates with other musicians in varying iterations and genres from duets to larger ensembles including her sound enveloping piece, “5×5, a composition for 25 synthesizers.” Her interest in creating familiarity, the feeling of giving, and human connection through sound and performance is the basis for “5:4:1, a composition for horns, voices, and percussion,” which premiered on July 25, 2019 at Levitt Pavilion Los Angeles. pehrspace and its non-profit, Pehr Arts, Ltd. are other projects she spends time on.

Gabie Strong is an interdisciplinary artist and educator exploring spatial constructions of decay as a means to improvise new arrangements of self-reflexive meaning. Strong uses photography, video, noise, improvised sound performance, and radio broadcasting to create dialectical art situated in the space between environmental degradation and violence against women. She is the founder of Crystalline Morphologies community imprint dedicated to releasing sound works by underserved Los Angles womxn artists and allies. She has also worked with Kchung Radio since its beginning to promote community accessible radio broadcasting, and is an original organizer of riot grrrl LA.