Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy Audio Description

Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy
Audio description written and read by Johanna Hedva

In all the galleries, the placement of the work is meant to unsettle those who rest in symmetry. The light is warm, skinless flesh.

Gallery 1

There are two works in this room. A sculpture hangs in the space. The other is a video projected on the wall.

The Clock Is Always Wrong (Other Mouth), 2023–ongoing

There is a mouth-blown glass form hanging from the ceiling by chains. When you stand beside it, it hovers at about the height of an abdomen. It is shaped like a sort of alien organ, with three large hooks piercing the top. The hooks, bent by hand, enter holes in the glass that look like open mouths. The bottom of the glass is shaped like exaggerated labia. We affectionately call this piece Sheela, after the medieval stone carvings called Sheela Na Gigs—deities who squat over the Earth with enormous, sacred vulvas.

The glass contains a sorcerous goo made from industrial-grade silicone oil mixed with black pigment. Two strands of the substance—each the width of a hair—stream from the two lips on the bottom of the glass onto black carpet.

The shape of the glass, the size of its mouths, and the viscosity of the goo have all been calculated so that the sculpture will take the entire duration of the exhibition to empty itself. It is time-specific as much as site-specific. It is a clock.

I first made a version of this work in 2022. I had spent more than a decade trying to make work that could outfox decay. But I am middle-aged now and have accepted that permanence is an expensive delusion to keep. I am trying instead to nurse an erotic relationship to deterioration, to feel alive because of the questionlessness of doom.

All Fear Is Erotic (with Ron Athey), 2024

On the wall is a color video projected across the height of the wall. It is ten minutes and forty-nine seconds long and silent.

In it, the performance artist Ron Athey massages my face with his hands. His hands and fingers are heavily tattooed. He pulls, stretches, and penetrates me. He reaches into my mouth, along my gums. He puts his fingers in my nose. My face turns red and swollen from pressure. What he is doing can look violent, but you can see us talking. I laugh and smile and chat and look worn out and fixed by the end.

Ron and I made this work around our shared practices of pain and ritual. Pain becomes something else when entered willingly, given structure and shared between people, held by trust. This is also how Ron pays his bills, as a deep structural somatic body worker. I get a session every other week. He’s the best in the business.

Gallery 2

There are three works in this room: two sculptural-paintings and a video projected on the wall.

I’m Not Punished by What You Like to Be Punished by, 2026

There is a rectangular, cage-like frame made of wood that has been burned until it is black. Two black wings extend from the upper part of the frame. Draped across them is a thin, flesh-like jersey fabric that falls toward the floor.

A knife pierces the gut of the jersey and pins it to the frame. Many fishhooks, individually handsewn, pierce it on either side of what look like scapulas. The shapes and forms in this piece look like San Sebastian, crucifixion, painful shoulders like a pillory, maybe a window or a grand proscenium, but also gills. The fabric gathers on the ground.

A weft of black Indian temple hair pools on the fabric, encased in a carapace of glue. Temple hair is human hair offered to the temple by a virgin. You can feel the weight of this sacrifice in the sorcery of the material itself. If you want to curse someone, you’ll need their hair. I am searching for forms of beauty that enter us slyly, through our own appetites and with perverse grace, and make us know in our bones that devotion always enters the room carrying a knife.

I’ll Take More, 2026

Nearby is another rectangular frame made of charred wood. A long spine of Indian temple hair hangs from it, held in place with bookbinding thread and two nails.

Mounted inside the frame is an old black cello-tuning peg, used by a concert musician for decades. A piano string is attached to the peg and rises from the frame until it meets the ceiling. A luna moth is suspended on the string, its pale green wings spread open but fixed. In this room, there are a lot of wings that can’t fly.

There is also a urethral sound hidden behind the hair. A urethral sound is a slender, polished metal instrument made to be inserted into the head of the penis. Obviously this can only happen with trust.

I am trying to make a cosmology of endurance, and I want it to be sexy, wet, and big. I want to take up space, demand duration; maybe there is an infinity in being stubborn. I want to show just how heavy, how insistent, how fragile a thing with a body is, and what it needs to hang in a large, expensive room, day in and day out. Show the ropes that hoist it up, the hooks that hold it.

The Vanity of Amnesia Keeps Me Young, 2026

On the wall is a color video with sound, five minutes and four seconds long.

In it, I am slowly eating a green Cymbidium orchid by candlelight. The petals are dripping with olive oil. You can only see my bare shoulders and mouth full of crooked teeth.

The soundtrack is a piece called Scream Demo, a recording of me screaming and singing in the Korean tradition of Pansori. Pansori prizes a voice made rough through use and age. I am deliberately shredding mine.

The “Lotus-Eaters” episode from Homer’s Odyssey is subtitled over the image of the video. Halfway through the video, the image reverses. The orchid begins coming back out of my mouth. Eating becomes uneating but the sound continues forward.

I made this while thinking about the fantasy that our home is something to be returned to, that suffering teaches us what to do with power.

The evidence for this is poor.

Gallery 3

There are two works in this room: a three-channel video projected on the wall and a large robotic sculpture suspended from the ceiling.

Untitled (Somebody Cheating Me), 2019

There is a three-channel video of my Korean grandmother during the last years of her life, when she had Alzheimer’s. She is small and old, with white hair over which she inexplicably wears a black toupee. We don’t know where she got the toupee. She reads old hospital bills that have already been paid. They sit in stacks around her hard-won house.

She reads the bills out loud to herself but by the time she gets to the bottom, she forgets why she is reading, so she starts again. Sometimes I am behind the camera talking to her.

In Korean mythology, the Jeoseung Saja is analogous to the Grim Reaper. They are psychopomps who escort the dead away from the world of the living. I thought I was attending to my grandmother as she moved away from her life. I have become less certain who was ferrying whom.

My grandmother died in October 2023. She left Korea during the Korean War and refused ever to return. In America, she worked as a maid in a hospital for thirty-three years and never once took a day off. Her spirit watches over me and made the new works in this show.

Soft Death Mommy, 2026

Suspended from the ceiling is a robotic sculpture with three black metal wings, each twenty-five feet long. We call her Mommy.

Her skeleton is made from a contaminated metal process that mixes steel and stainless steel. Motors are mounted on the ceiling with disks that correspond to different planets in our solar system. Two thousand yards of black grosgrain ribbon are hand-stitched, knotted, and tangled around the structure. Grosgrain has tiny ribs. It catches slightly against the skin.

The ribbons hang in enormous black masses from shark hooks on the joints of each of the three wings. I kept telling people during the two and a half years of making Mommy that it should feel like you’ve accidentally slipped through the Employees Only Door at the center of the universe.

She moves like the kind of breathing we do when we sleep. Her movements are controlled by timers. I calculated projected human birth, life, and death rates for the year 6050 CE, when the seven classical planets are projected to return to the signs they occupy in the Thema Mundi, an ancient Hellenistic astrological chart of the birth of the world. It is a future sky in which the gods are back home.

One wing follows birth. One follows life. One follows death.

There is also a smell. Every day, the sculpture is perfumed with the fragrance of blue ink on white paper. I think about ghosts every day. Every day I think about how much presence an absence has.

Images: Johanna Hedva: Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy, installation view, the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), New York, 2026. Photos by Zach Hyman.