This year, as the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) celebrates the 20th anniversary of its Zaha Hadid-designed building, the CAC marks the occasion with A Permanent Nostalgia for Departure: A Rehearsal on Legacy with Zaha Hadid, a group exhibition that examines legacy through a collection of new commissions by an international roster of artists that proposes a take on Hadid’s practice and the CAC building itself. The Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, which opened in 2003, was the first U.S. museum designed by a woman and Hadid’s first completed building in the U.S. The exhibition, which is guest curated by Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, opens September 22 and is on view through January 28, 2024.

“Zaha Hadid’s iconic design of our building is a symbol of innovation and creativity, and it embodies our mission as an incubator for creative expression in the Cincinnati community and beyond,” said Executive Director of the CAC, Christina Vassallo. “It only seems fitting to celebrate Hadid’s visionary work as a creative force by asking a new generation of artists to reflect and respond to the impact she made throughout her life and how her ideas continue to live on and inspire us all.”

A Permanent Nostalgia for Departure 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.

Working throughout a diverse set of media that crosses sculpture, installation, textiles, sound, video, or performance and with multiple cultural backgrounds and practices the 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.

Through each artist's 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 these ideas. Each of the new commissioned works by the contributing artists is an exercise to mobilize knowledge that departs from Zaha 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 and ephemera by Zaha Hadid that depict the new aesthetic regime the architect created and bring back a vocabulary that, far from any built project, preserves full potentiality to keep expanding.