Zaha Hadid Foundation Announces Autumn 2026 Exhibition Programme
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This autumn, the Zaha Hadid Foundation presents two exhibitions exploring architecture through performance, moving image, poetry and spatial experimentation. Opening on 3 November 2026, Zaha Hadid: Architecture of Performance and The Rebar Beneath by LionHeart approach architecture from distinct perspectives, examining its relationship to other creative disciplines and the ways in which space, form and material shape our understanding of the world.
Zaha Hadid: Architecture of Performance is the first exhibition to explore a lesser-known dimension of Hadid’s work, tracing the exchange between architecture and performance across five international projects spanning twenty-five years. Bringing together archival drawings, models, digital renders, costume designs, photographs and film, it follows Hadid’s collaborations with choreographers, musicians, fashion designers and filmmakers, from early experiments in dance and spectatorship to multimedia stage environments and opera.
These projects reveal how performance offered Hadid a space to test architectural ideas beyond the constraints of the permanent building, while anticipating developments in her wider practice. The exhibition considers performance not as an adjunct to architecture, but as a medium through which architectural ideas could be explored, realised and transformed.
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The Rebar Beneath by LionHeart (Rhael Cape), commissioned by the Zaha Hadid Foundation, brings together film, poetry, performance and spatial installation in an exploration of the relationship between surface and depth, perception and the unseen. Developed through an engagement with Hadid’s archive and the radical formal experimentation of her early work, the exhibition considers what lies beneath the forms that first attract our attention.
Moving between material and metaphor, LionHeart’s work challenges familiar modes of interpretation, inviting audiences to look beyond immediate appearances and consider how architecture can evoke memory, identity and emotion.
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Together, the exhibitions reflect the Foundation’s commitment to exploring architecture as an open and evolving field of enquiry. Through historical research and contemporary artistic practice, they reveal how architectural ideas extend beyond the built environment, finding expression through movement, image, language and experience. They also offer an opportunity to reconsider the legacy of Zaha Hadid’s work and its continuing capacity to inspire new forms of experimentation.
Both exhibitions open on 3 November 2026 at the Zaha Hadid Foundation, 10 Bowling Green Lane, London.
Zaha Hadid: Architecture of Performance
3 November 2026 – 27 March 2027
The Rebar Beneath by LionHeart
3 November 2026 – 24 April 2027