A Permanent Nostalgia for Departure

Artists: Rand Abdul Jabbar, Khyam Allami, Emii Alrai, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Andrea Canepa, Dima Srouji, and Civil Architecture Studio

Curated by Maite Borjabad López-Pastor.

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. This group exhibition 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 is guest curated by Maite Borjabad López-Pastor and is on view September 22, 2023–January 28, 2024.

“Zaha Hadid’s iconic design of our building symbolizes innovation and creativity. 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 by asking a new generation of artists to reflect and respond to the impact she made and how her ideas continue to live on and inspire us all.”

The curatorial text offers that 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.” Adnan’s poetic words proposed an understanding of Hadid’s oeuvre as an invitation to take a trip. This exhibition expands on Adnan’s prompt, proposing a take on Zaha Hadid’s legacy not as a conclusive overview, but rather as a point of departure full of possibilities and reflections. 

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, which—once emancipated from the author—opens a range of questions and concepts that continue to generate an ecosystem of knowledge. This exhibition actively uses Hadid’s architectural thinking as a starting point, a source of knowledge that can be activated, transferred and evolved. 

Working throughout a diverse set of media and with multiple cultural backgrounds and practices, the participating artists include 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 show reflects upon the idea of distance in time, history, cultural background, landscapes, and how a legacy can become a passageway for these ideas. 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 depicts the new aesthetic regime the architect created and brings back a vocabulary that, far from any built project, preserves full potentiality to keep expanding.

Exhibition Sponsors: the Zaha Hadid Foundation, Michele & Michael Schuster, Rosemary & Mark Schlachter, DaSci Consulting Group, GBBN, Barbara Weston Sasser and Carol Weston Roberts, Barbara Myers, and Western & Southern Financial Group, in addition to the in-kind support of the Zaha Hadid Foundation, Eco Development, and the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati.

Annual CAC Exhibition Sponsors: Gale and Dave Beckett, Belflex and Jason McCaw, Barbara Weston Sasser and Carol Weston Roberts, Ronnie and John Shore, Helen and Brian Heekin, Barbara Myers, and the generous contributors to the CAC Exhibition Fund. General operating support for the CAC is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, ArtsWave, the P&G Fund, and the Johnson Foundation.