Beneath the surface.
This November, the
Zaha Hadid Foundation unveils The Rebar Beneath, a newly commissioned exhibition by the multidisciplinary artist and poet LionHeart, born of his sustained engagement with Zaha Hadid’s archive. It is a quietly radical proposition: to approach one of architecture’s most celebrated visionaries not through her finished buildings, but through the thinking that made them possible.
The title offers the key. Rebar, the steel framework concealed within concrete, is the invisible structure on which everything else depends, and LionHeart takes it as both metaphor and method. Looking past the sweeping curves and gravity-defying forms for which Hadid is known, he turns instead to the ideas, experiments and provocations that lie beneath them. Film anchors the exhibition, while poetry, performance and spatial installation translate the language of Hadid’s early formal experiments into something entirely his own.
LionHeart, also known as Rhael Cape, moves fluidly between poetry, moving image, performance and installation. Architecture has long been a preoccupation in his practice, which explores how memory, identity and perception shape the ways we inhabit and understand space. Here, that enquiry finds a fitting interlocutor.
In LionHeart’s hands, Hadid’s archive becomes less a repository than a living material, its experiments with form carried into new mediums and a new generation. As the title promises, the real story lies just below the surface.
