f-architecture: Cosmo-Clinical Interiors of Beirut



Galerie VI PER cordially invites you to the opening of the exhibition Cosmo-clinical Interiors in Beirut, prepared by the team f-architecture.



The exhibition Cosmo-clinical Interiors in Beirut explores the formation of spaces, interior design, and the internal rules of plastic surgery clinics. It aims to highlight their role in shaping subjects, creating a culture of virginity and the ideal body. Especially Beirut, this capital of medical tourism in the Middle East, the beauty of Arabic soap operas, and the persistent gender and sexual norms, is a place where the local fascination with the body and its correction intersects in plastic surgery clinics. The exhibition is based on the aesthetics of interior spaces and the architectural conception of hymenoplastic clinics found in Beirut, but experienced on a global scale.



Virginity remains a stimulus for empowerment and self-perception for women all over the world. The concept of virginity is constructed not only in the physical realm but also through various architectural operations, in spaces that serve as intermediaries between the subject and their desires. The clinic is a place where the body is re-established and also produced. Architecture is understood here as a interplay of technological, social, and economic forces – not merely as a physical, built reality, but as an organizational force influencing the formation of a set of produced and productive objects.



The landscape of commodified virginity is composed of interconnected, layered interiors: a set of medico-cosmetic and vaginoplastic practices that are deliberately concealed behind assemblies of ordinary building shells, secured virtual private networks (VPNs), discreet packages, and informal networks of designers, manufacturers, distributors, doctors, patients/consumers, and sometimes even families of (un)chaste women. The visualization of the spaces of these reciprocal exchanges – social capital, self-protection, and power – illustrates how bodily ideals are operationalized in otherwise abstract registers: among economic, regulatory, social, and familial structures that govern the proper relationships between bodies, which often means a relationship that serves male desire at the expense of women's needs.



feminist architecture collaborative (Gabrielle Printz, Virginia Black, and Rosana Elkhatib) is a three-member research initiative from New York focusing on unraveling contemporary bodily politics concerning space, both in intimate and global scales. The exhibition Cosmo-clinical Interiors in Beirut is part of an extensive research effort in the field of constructed cultures and the economies of virginity.