A Permanent Nostalgia for Departure: A Rehearsal on Legacy with Zaha Hadid

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's 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. It asks what are the possibilities of actively engaging with the outcome of a creative action? A drawing, a painting, a building, a text, or an idea, once emancipated from the author, opens a range of constantly evolving questions, meanings, and concepts that continue to generate an ecosystem of knowledge.

This exhibition is a take on architectural legacy that transcends a monolithic approach. Rather, it 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.

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. The list of participating artists includes Rand Abdul Jabbar (b. Baghdad, 1990, currently lives and works in Abu Dhabi), Khyam Allami (b. Damascus, 1981, currently lives and works in Berlin), Emii Alrai (b. Blackpool, 1993, currently lives and works in Leeds), Hera Büyüktaşcıyan (b. Istanbul, 1984), Andrea Canepa (b. Lima, 1980, currently lives and works in Berlin), Dima Srouji (b. Nazareth, 1990, currently lives and works in London) and Hamed Bukhamseen (b. Kuwait City, 1991) and Ali Ismail Karimi (b. Manama, 1989) as founders of Civil Architecture Studio.

The exhibition also brings a selection of paintings and ephemera by Zaha Hadid that depict the unique aesthetic regime the architect created. These selections highlight the early stages of Hadid’s process, bringing back a vocabulary that—far from any built project—preserves full potentiality to keep expanding.