Johanna Hedva’s ‘Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy’ Drips Toward Its Own End at CARA

Johanna Hedva’s first solo show in New York is a slow drip of black ink and charred wood, built around the idea that everything in it will eventually run out. The exhibition, Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy, runs at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), and it wants you to feel the weight of time running out.

The show opens with a simple setup: a glass vial hanging from the ceiling, filled with a thick, dark liquid, slowly leaking into the carpet below. Hedva says the vial holds enough to last until December, after which the empty bottle signals the end of the show itself. That sense of finality carries through everything she makes.

The Vial and Its Liquid

The vial is the heart of the installation. It drips continuously, and the carpet absorbs the stain.

Fabric Over Charred Wood

The main gallery holds a piece titled “I’m Not Punished by What You Like to Be Punished by” (2026). A light-tan jersey fabric stretches across a panel of charred wood, pooling on the floor beneath it. The edges of the fabric are trimmed with Indian temple hair — hair shorn during Hindu rituals, often sold to Western consumers in tracks to fund temple upkeep.

A Second Piece With Temple Hair

The temple hair also shows up in the sculpture “I’ll Take More” (2026), where a mane drapes over the wooden frame. A preserved luna moth hangs from a piano string that pushes out from the panel.

What Works Here

• The vial and its dripping liquid set a clear tone
• The charred wood reads as decay, which fits the show’s themes
• The temple hair appears across both gallery pieces

What Falls Short

Not every piece lands with the same force. The review notes that the show grapples with surrendering to the cosmos but doesn’t always convince the viewer to follow Hedva into the void.

The Review’s Take

The show is ambitious. It wants to collapse the difference between life and death, sickness and health, presence and absence. It succeeds in creating a mood — the dripping vial, the charred wood, the pooled fabric — but the show isn’t always convincing enough for one to follow Hedva into the void.

Hedva’s writing has already established her as an artist who treats illness and death as subjects worth exploring. The show draws on that same territory, but the visual pieces don’t always match the depth of the prose. The review’s verdict is fair: the show is made with its own demise in mind, but it isn’t always convincing enough for one to follow Hedva into the void.

Source material: “The Agony and Ecstasy of Johanna Hedva,” Hyperallergic.

art review · CARA · installation art · Johanna Hedva · New York