Johanna Hedva: Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy

CARA’s fall 2026 exhibition, Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy, is Johanna Hedva’s first institutional exhibition in New York. Devoted to deviant forms of knowledge, Hedva’s practice moves between sculpture, installation, video, writing, and sound. Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy is the most ambitious presentation of their visual work, including pieces commissioned by CARA. Opening Saturday, September 19, the exhibition gathers time-based installation and video alongside newly produced sculptural wall paintings and a large-scale kinetic sculpture.

“I like working with gravity, deterioration, materiality that’s destroyed over time, ruins; I try to make the abyss feel visceral and intimate and close for my viewer,” writes Hedva. Time functions as a primary material in the exhibition—from a mouthblown glass vessel that slowly drains black goo until it is empty, to a new 20-foot robotic sculpture that spins and tangles ribbon. Works take shape through duration: leaking, sagging, knotting, and giving way. Together they compose an erotics of gravity, asking what beauty becomes when decay is not resisted but allowed to run its course.

The exhibition emerges in conversation with Hedva’s expansive writing practice, including their forthcoming collection My Knife Collection and Other Subjects of Desire (Sming Sming Books, 2026). The publication gathers fourteen years of Hedva’s shape-shifting writing into one book: essays, stories, poems, a play, litanies, spells, fables, devotionals, omens, a curse, and a seance. The writing moves across fiction, criticism, philosophy, poetry, divination, and apparitions of the artist’s own sculptures and installations, a field guide to the ruins and enchantments of the present. Alongside the exhibition, CARA will host the publication’s release in its bookstore, where, in 2025, Hedva celebrated the New York launch of their essay collection How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom (Hillman Grad Books, 2024).

With Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy, Hedva’s practice takes up space and demands duration, asking what becomes of us when we allow ourselves to be seduced by, or become obedient to, the fate of our own entropy.

Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy is curated by Pablo José Ramírez.

Johanna Hedva is a Korean American artist, writer, and musician based between Los Angeles and New York. They are the author of the 2024 essay collection How to Tell When We Will Die, winner of the Amber Hollibaugh Award, and the novels Your Love Is Not Good and On Hell. Hedva has exhibited at Modern Art Oxford, MASS MoCA, Migros Museum Zürich, Gropius Bau Berlin, and the Seoul Mediacity and Shanghai Biennials.

Pablo José Ramírez is a curator at the Hammer Museum. He served as the inaugural adjunct curator of First Nations and Indigenous Art at Tate Modern (2019–2023). Ramírez was part of the curatorial council of the 58th Carnegie International: Is it morning for you yet? (2023) and recently curated the group exhibition Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials (2026). He is currently working on the first major retrospective exhibition of Chicano artist and cultural icon Joey Terrill, opening in the fall of 2027.