The sixth chapter of Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives, honours the tenth anniversary of Dame Zaha Hadid’s passing (b. 31/10/1950, Baghdad, Iraq – d. 31/03/2016, Miami, Florida, USA). This exhibition revisits the long conversation between the curator and the legendary architect, which began in the late 1990s when Obrist invited Hadid to realise Meshworks at the Villa Medici in 2000. Hadid was a trustee of the Serpentine from 1996, and she designed its inaugural Pavilion in 2000 invited by Julia Peyton-Jones. Following Obrist’s appointment at the Serpentine in 2006, she participated in several of its Marathons and later designed the Serpentine North Gallery in 2013.
For the first time since 2016, the exhibition brings together her early calligraphic paintings and notebooks—exercises in Suprematist geometry that informed her built projects, from the Vitra Fire Station (1993) to the CMA CGM Tower (2011) in Marseille or Pierresvives (2012) in Montpellier—along with previously unseen video interviews from 2001 to 2013. Presented in The Tower designed by the late Frank Gehry, a close friend of Hadid’s, the show spans three chapters of her career as an architect: from Constructivism to her early projects and reception in the French context, and her longstanding relationship with Obrist.
In close collaboration with the Zaha Hadid Foundation.
