Dithyramb: Zaha Hadid’s Legacy, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Curated by Maite Borjabad 2023
Zaha’s perceived legacy is physical, but the essence of who she was and her methods of manoeuvring and navigating architecture leave an ephemeral mark beyond the building as an object. Instead, her flow, her body entering and exiting spaces, her performativity on stage and off, as well as the curated scenographies of her paintings, stage designs, fashion, and her character leave a mark. Despite their ephemerality, these elements remain more intrinsically in our bodies as a legacy of a dancing being, constantly finding a balance between destruction and total liberation. It is unclear whether she was and is absolutely dynamic or absolutely static. This contraction scales between her own self and her larger practice.
Zaha’s only known self-portrait, where the building becomes her body, a part of the whole relationship, also captures fragmentation on the scale of cities from her youth like Baghdad and Beirut. The constant state of displacement that Zaha has referenced as somehow liberating is simultaneously a state of dismemberment. Her buildings, frozen fragments caught in mid-air, reflect her own body and the cities of her youth. This project attempts to restitch fragments, elevating the architecture to a stage, allowing the city to find moments of rupture, both of low and high resolution, where the blurriness between liberation and destruction exists simultaneously. Here, the body becomes a form of growing knowledge, a place for knowledge production to exist and constantly change, and where new building methods occur.
The project, a stage set borrowing from Zaha’s practice, allows multiple cities to take centre stage as a meditation on Zaha’s life, imagining what her home videos might have felt like during what she calls the happiest years of her life.
