Tracing a radical imagination through dialogue, drawing and the unfinished future.
29 April 2026
Marking a decade since Zaha Hadid’s passing, LUMA Arles’ latest chapter in the Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives unfolds as both homage and provocation, positioning the architect not as a fixed legacy but as an ongoing method of thinking. Anchored in a long-standing conversation between Hadid and Obrist that began in the late 1990s, the exhibition foregrounds dialogue as a generative tool, one that moves fluidly between architecture, painting and urban speculation.
Installed within Frank Gehry’s tower, the presentation gathers rare archival materials including early calligraphic paintings, notebooks and previously unseen interviews, mapping the conceptual scaffolding behind Hadid’s built and unbuilt works. These fragments reveal an architect who resisted closure, using abstraction, geometry and layered perspectives to reimagine spatial possibility long before digital technologies made such complexity commonplace.
Rather than a conventional retrospective, the exhibition proposes Hadid’s practice as a continuous horizon. From her engagement with the Russian avant-garde to her enduring influence on contemporary urbanism, what emerges is a portrait of experimentation as ethos: restless, speculative and defiantly open-ended.
This exhibition will be on view at LUMA Arles, France, from 1 May 2026 until 31 March 2027.
