New York · United States
Johanna Hedva's Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy at CARA
The artist's first New York institutional show explores entropy, duration, and deviant knowledge through sculpture, video, and sound.
A New York Debut for Hedva
The Centre for Art, Research and Alliances opens its autumn programme with a landmark solo presentation by Johanna Hedva. Titled Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy, the exhibition marks the Korean American creator's inaugural institutional survey in the city. Spanning September through December 2026, the show assembles an ambitious array of visual practices that refuse disciplinary boundaries. Hedva's output typically traverses sculpture, audio, moving image, and textual forms, yet this gathering represents their most extensive visual undertaking to date. Several commissions produced specifically for the venue anchor the presentation.
Sculpting Entropy and Duration
Central to the installation is an investigation of gravitational pull and material degradation. Hedva treats time as a physical substance, allowing objects to transform through natural processes rather than resisting their deterioration. A hand-blown glass container gradually empties a viscous black liquid, while a towering twenty-foot mechanical apparatus continuously twists and knots coloured ribbons. Additional sculptural murals and time-based projections complement these kinetic elements. The works collectively examine how beauty shifts when decay is permitted to proceed unimpeded. By foregrounding sagging, leaking, and structural yielding, the artist cultivates an intimate encounter with ruin. The experience operates as a meditation on surrender, questioning how human subjectivity responds when confronted with inevitable collapse.
Text, Performance, and Publication
The visual programme intersects directly with Hedva's literary output. The exhibition runs parallel to the upcoming release of My Knife Collection and Other Subjects of Desire, published by Sming Sming Books next year. This volume consolidates fourteen years of experimental prose, weaving together philosophical essays, poetic fragments, theatrical scripts, and ritualistic invocations. The text mirrors the spatial arrangements, functioning as a cartography of contemporary ruin and speculative enchantment. CARA has previously hosted the artist for the launch of their acclaimed 2024 essay collection concerning disability, suffering, and mortality. Manuela Moscoso, the institution's director, emphasised that the venue deliberately provides the temporal space required for such multidisciplinary practices to fully materialise. Pablo José Ramírez, a curator at the Hammer Museum, has shaped the exhibition's layout, drawing upon his extensive experience with material-focused and decolonial frameworks.
Practical Information
The opening reception takes place on Saturday 19 September from four to seven in the afternoon. Guided walkthroughs led by the creator will occur on 24 October and 21 November, with supplementary programming details to follow shortly. Hedva's broader career includes solo and group presentations across institutions such as Modern Art Oxford, MASS MoCA, the Migros Museum, Gropius Bau, and recent biennial cycles in Seoul and Shanghai. Their literary portfolio also encompasses the novels Your Love Is Not Good and On Hell, alongside the award-winning 2024 essay collection How to Tell When We Will Die.
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