Johanna Hedva Exhibition At CARA Features Work Designed For Its Own End

(MENAFN- USA Art News) An exhibition by Korean-American artist, writer, and composer Johanna Hedva at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) incorporates its own planned obsolescence. Titled Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy, the show's initial piece,“The Clock Is Always Wrong (Other Mouth)” ( 2023–ongoing ), features a glass vial suspended by hooks and chains from the ceiling.

A dark, viscous liquid drips from the vial's spout and seeps into the carpeted gallery floor. This sculpture reportedly contains enough liquid to last until December, at which point its emptiness will signify the exhibition's closure. This theme of finality extends across Hedva's artistic practice, which also includes prose, poems, and essays such as“Sick Woman Theory” ( 2016 ), where illness and death are explored as sites of discovery rather than despair.

Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy presents a total of six works that engage with themes of cosmic surrender. On the main second-floor gallery,“I'm Not Punished by What You Like to Be Punished by” ( 2026 ) consists of light-tan jersey fabric stretched over charred wood and pooled on the floor. Its edge is decorated with Indian temple hair, which is shorn during Hindu rituals and often sold to Western consumers to fund temple maintenance.

This Indian temple hair also appears in another sculpture,“I'll Take More” ( 2026 ), where a mane of hair is draped over the piece's wooden frame. A preserved luna moth is also suspended by a piano string that protrudes from the panel in this work.

Source: Hyperallergic

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