To commemorate the 20th anniversary of its opening, Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) is staging an exhibition that traces the artistic development and influence of its late designer, Zaha Hadid. Hadid’s own paintings and early-career work will be placed in conversation with the work of artists who cite her as an inspiration in a “multi-layered” exhibition organized by Guggenheim Bilbao curator Maite Borjabad.
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.
