Credit: Zaha Hadid, Malevich Tektonic project

Cost

Free

CAC Exhibit Hours

Wednesday - Friday: 10am - 7pm

Saturday - Sunday: 10am - 4pm

Exhibit Overview

In 2011 Etel Adnan wrote in an ode to Zaha Hadid, “to discover, in this woman who built a solid rock, a permanent nostalgia for departure. Everything she made seems to always be the day before a departure, a permanent invitation to the imagination, and to the imaginary.” Referring to Baudelaire’s “Invitation to the Voyage,” Adnan's poetic words proposed an understanding of Hadid oeuvre as an invitation to take a trip. In such a way, this exhibition expands on Adnan's prompt and proposes a take on Zaha Hadid's legacy—not as a conclusive overview, but rather as a point of departure full of possibilities and reflections.

The exhibition reflects on what legacy means, and challenges what are the possibilities of actively engaging with the outcome of a creative action, and how the present can be thought through history. A drawing, a painting, a building, a text, or an idea, once emancipated from the author, opens up a range of questions, meanings, and concepts that, while in constant evolution, continue to generate an ecosystem of knowledge.

This exhibition is a take on architectural legacy that transcends a monolithic approach and rather wants to actively use Hadid's architectural thinking as a starting point, as a source of knowledge that can be activated, transferred and evolved. Through site-specific and all-new commissioned works, the show reflects upon the idea of distance in time, history, cultural background, and landscapes, and how a legacy can become a passageway for it. Each of the new commissioned works by the contributing artists is an exercise to mobilize knowledge that departs from Hadid and evolves towards the unknown of the provocation, resisting then the idea of a retrospective or monographic traditional exhibition and with it a monolithic narrative on the architect’s practice. Accompanying all the context-specific and personally-situated responses of each of the artists, the exhibition brings a selection of paintings by Zaha Hadid that deploy the new aesthetic regime the architect created, bringing back a vocabulary that far from any built project, preserves full potentiality to keep expanding.

The participating artists are creating new, site-specific works ranging in a diverse set of media that crosses sculpture, installation, textiles, sound, video, or performance and with multiple cultural backgrounds and practices.

Learn more about the exhibit.