Johanna Hedva's Clock Runs Out at CARA in December

Johanna Hedva's exhibition at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) in New York carries a built-in expiration date: December. The Korean-American artist, writer and composer titled the show Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy, and designed its first work to empty itself, drop by drop, until the space closes.

That opening work, "The Clock Is Always Wrong (Other Mouth)" (2023–ongoing), hangs a mouth-blown glass vial from the ceiling on hand-bent hooks and chains. A viscous, ink-black liquid — silicone oil mixed with pigment — drips slowly from its spout and seeps into the carpeted gallery floor. The vial contains just enough liquid to last until December. When it runs dry, the exhibition ends.

What does the dripping clock mean?

The sculpture literalizes a preoccupation that runs through Hedva's entire practice: the encroaching doom of illness and death, treated as sites of exploration rather than despair. Beyond visual art, Hedva is an accomplished writer whose prose, poems and essays — most prominently "Sick Woman Theory" (2016) — frame chronic sickness and mortality as political and aesthetic territory rather than pure hopelessness.

Gravity, My / Favorite Enemy gathers six works that grapple with surrendering oneself to the cosmos. On the evidence of this selection, Hyperallergic's reviewer finds the gambit only partly successful: the works are not, in the critic's judgment, quite convincing enough to follow Hedva into the void.

What fills the main gallery?

The second-floor gallery holds "I'm Not Punished by What You Like to Be Punished by" (2026). Light-tan jersey fabric stretches over a panel of charred wood and puddles onto the floor. Its edge is adorned with Indian temple hair — hair shorn during Hindu rituals and often sold to Western consumers in tracks to fund temple upkeep.

The same material returns in "I'll Take More" (2026), where a mane drapes over the sculpture's wood frame and a preserved luna moth hangs suspended by a piano string jutting from the panel. The materials read as a inventory of bodily sacrifice: charred wood, fish hooks, embroidery floss, a knife, goose feathers, glue.

Why build an exhibition to die?

Hedva's vial turns duration into content. Rather than a fixed object, the visitor encounters a process with a known terminus, and the show's closure becomes part of the artwork itself. The gesture aligns with the artist's wider writing on sickness, where bodily limitation is not overcome but inhabited.

Whether CARA's audiences take that step remains an open question until December — when the last drop falls and the artist's clock, always wrong, finally stops.