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](https://www.cara-nyc.org/program/events/how-to-tell-when-we-will-die-book-launch-and-conversation-with-johanna-hedva-and-zefyr-lisowski) 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.