Johanna Hedva: My Knife Collection and Other Subjects of Desire
Published by Sming Sming Books
COMING SOON!
ISBN 978-1-953189-26-4
November 2026, English, 5 x 8 in
Design: Sming Sming Books
My Knife Collection and Other Subjects of Desire is an orphanage for the unruly, lawless short pieces of Johanna Hedva’s oracular practice. Published between 2012 and 2026—in places such as e-flux, frieze, Tate, MASS MoCA, and the Seoul Mediacity Biennial—these works keep their cloven feet in many different worlds, spanning essays, fiction, spells, fables, devotionals, séances, and as apparitions of Hedva’s sculptures and installations.
Across years marked by illness, acclaim, and apocalypse, Hedva arrives as a fortuneteller at the end of the world. On these pages, sculptures drip and drain, and a knife impales the wall of a museum. Hair floats in bowls of honey, while quantum mechanics bloom in the mouth of a ghost. Cockroaches inherit their duties from dead mothers. Simone Weil, Nine Inch Nails, and Mire Lee drift through as psychopomps.
One of our most accomplished smugglers between worlds and genres, Hedva offers a cosmological field guide to contemporary ruin and enchantment.
________
Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives between LA and New York. Hedva’s practice cooks magic, necromancy, and divination together with mystical states of fury and ecstasy, and political states of solidarity and disintegration. They are devoted to deviant forms of knowledge and to doom as a liberatory condition.
Hedva is the author of four books, most recently the 2024 essay collection How To Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, which won the Amber Hollibaugh award for LGBTQ Social Justice writing. They are the author of the novels Your Love Is Not Good, which Kirkus called a “hellraising, resplendent must read,” and On Hell, which was named one of Dennis Cooper’s favorites of 2018. They are also the author of Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, which collects a decade of work in poetry, plays, performances, and essays. Their artwork has been exhibited internationally, and their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House and The Sun and the Moon.