cosmo-clinical interiors of beirut
Prague, New York, Singapore10/2018 - 11/2019 | 6/2019 - 7/2019 | 11/2018 - 01/2019
an augmented exhibition of clinic interiors renders new access to the curious and gendered landscape of hymenoplastic medical practice in Beirut. The project was exhibited at VI PER Gallery in Prague, the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center Galleries in New York, and Nanyang Technological University’s ADM Gallery in Singapore.
Virginity remains consequential to the agency, empowerment, and self-possession of women around the world. The concept of virginity is constructed not just at the site of the body, but also in multiscalar architectural operations, in the spaces that mediate between subjects and their desires. The clinic is a site of bodily reinvention and also production. Interior finishes, collateral objects, and aesthetic protocols aid in the spatial and cultural production of contemporary virginity and sexuality, available in new commodity forms. Beirut in particular—a Middle East capital for medical tourism, Arab soap-star beauty, and lingering gender and sexual norms—is a site where bodily indulgences and corrections converge in the plastic surgery clinic.
As both physical reproduction and VR navigation of documented clinic interiors, the exhibition acts as both record of and speculation about hymenoplastic architecture. Cosmo-Clinical Interiors of Beirut examines the constructed space, interior finishes, and designed protocols of the plastic surgery clinic to make perceptible its role in shaping subjects, virginity culture and an ideal body. Here, architecture is understood as the confluence of the technological, social, and economic—not a built fact, but an organizing force in a constellation of produced and productive objects.
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research | design | exhibition
a project of f-architecture
partners: virginia black, gabrielle printz
VR specialist: kathy yuen
