About

The Rebar Beneath (2026)
Film, poetry, performance and spatial installation
Commissioned and presented by Zaha Hadid Foundation, London
3 November 2026 – March 2027

The Rebar Beneath (2026)

The Rebar Beneath is a multidisciplinary film and exhibition by LionHeart exploring the tension between surface and depth, perception and meaning, conformity and experimentation. Developed through an engagement with Zaha Hadid’s archive and the radical formal language of her early works, the project considers architecture as a language to be read, felt and questioned.

Written, directed and performed by LionHeart, the film brings poetry, performance, moving image and sound into dialogue with Hadid’s spatial experimentation. Rather than representing architecture literally, The artist translates its underlying principles of movement, tension, distortion and instability, into an embodied visual language.

The title draws upon rebar, the reinforcement concealed within concrete, as a metaphor for the unseen structures beneath the forms we encounter.

Presented as a spatial installation at the Zaha Hadid Foundation, The Rebar Beneath extends this inquiry into contemporary culture’s relationship with immediacy and visual gratification. Using form as a point of seduction, the work asks what might become visible when we move beyond first impressions—and what new ways of seeing, thinking and understanding can emerge when the surface no longer suffices.

Commissioned by the Zaha Hadid Foundation.

BTS Photography (Day 1 + Day 2)