(Exhibition from 23 October to 20 November 2026)

We exist on a rotating sphere, held to it by the one force we rarely think to question: gravity. It grounds us, orients us, and connects every living and non-living thing on this planet, yet we experience it in radically different registers, sometimes as burden, other times as embrace. Tractions of Gravity brings together the work of Ruth Anderwald and Leonhard Grond, Vienna-based artist-researchers whose academic and curatorial practice spans over a decade of inquiry into the issue of dizziness and groundlessness.

At the center of this exhibition are two photographic bodies of work in direct dialogue: Atlases (2008–ongoing), which explores gravity as the weight of the world, showcasing a laboring body as infrastructure that bears what would otherwise fall, and Joys of Gravity (2024–ongoing), which shows that same force experienced as embrace, as the ground that catches us and the pull that lets a body fall into rest, into play, into another body. Additional works, including sound and video pieces drawn from the artists' research into dizziness and groundlessness, accompany these two series to further extend the exhibition's exploration of gravity's dual nature.

Rather than resolving the tension between endurance and delight, pressure and attraction, the exhibition holds them open together. Burden and joy are not opposing forces requiring reconciliation, but rather two descriptions of a single relation. It is precisely through this unresolved tension, this push and pull, that movement itself becomes possible, and in the midst of uncertainty, and indeed dizziness, a different kind of clarity emerges, one only visible from within the instability.

Tractions of Gravity does not ask visitors to choose between Atlas's labor and gravity's delight, nor to dissolve one into the other. It asks instead what new orientation becomes possible for a body willing to be, at once, weighted and held, endured and enjoyed, propelled forward by the very tension it cannot resolve.