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MEdiNA GSD is pleased to present
Rosana Elkhatib
Co-Founder of f-architecture; designer, curator, researcher and writer
Architecture is political. Architecture is Labor.
Rosana Elkhatib will present the work of f-architecture, a feminist architecture practice she co-founded with Gabrielle Printz and Virginia Black. Working through architecture and its refusal, their activist spatial office is grounded in research and situating it in public forms through exhibiting, writing, performing, and protesting. This work includes Republic of Body, a public performance that took place in Amman in 2016, Cosmo-Clinical Interiors of Beirut which looks into contemporary constructions of virginity, and lastly, the ongoing project Passport, which analyzes the ways gendered notions of body and bodily practices incur into legal/political/social conditions of non-belonging, conflict, and precarity.
Rosana Elkhatib is an architect-trained researcher and curator from Amman, Jordan and currently based in New York City. Her research focuses on the mutual constitution of bodies and spaces as they are further complicated by their political, social, and religious environs, specifically in the urbanizing Middle East.
Her graduate research has coalesced into a curatorial project called "Republic of Body," a performance that took place in October of 2016 in the city of Amman. There, local feminist and queer artists and performers assumed visible orientations as precarious sexual bodies via an experimental infiltration of the Arab public space. The performance was costumed by a series of multiply-symbolic objects, which attempted to express the intersectionality and mutual construction of queer, Arab, and gender identities.
Rosana holds a B.Arch from the Illinois Institute of Technology and a M.S. in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture from Columbia University GSAPP.
Co-sponsor: Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Contact: Hanan Kataw