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The Lab announces The Chapel of Becoming, a new work by Leila Weefur. This architectural experience constructs a sacred space grounded in the premise that the trans\* body is itself a site of devotion. Weefur’s Chapel includes a newly commissioned video work, On Devotion, alongside an archive in the form of ceramic tiles imprinted by hand with the floor plans of centuries-old religious structures. Treating everyday actions as forms of spiritual practice, Weefur brings together trans\* community members in On Devotion, including pioneering historian and theorist Susan Stryker. A companion performance work, Songs, Sermons & Sacred Voyeurism, developed in collaboration with artist Chani Bockwinkel, will be presented in November.The exhibition draws on the scholarship of Jack Halberstam, whose term Trans\* anarchitecture names a formal convergence of trans\* bodies and artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s practice of anarchitecture. Halberstam describes trans\* bodies as assembled through cuts, modifications, and intervention, bodies that unbuild inherited gender forms and hold themselves in states of raw unresolved becoming. Connecting this to Matta-Clark’s anarchitecture, in which architecture becomes a process of splitting and splicing, cutting into normative preexisting structures, Halberstam names this formal convergence Trans\* anarchitecture. Weefur’s Chapel enacts this Trans\* anarchitectural framework in the context of religious spaces: unbuilding the architectural forms that have enforced exclusion from spiritual life and holding open what the unbuilding reveals.
An opening reception for The Chapel of Becoming will take place from 5pm - 8pm, on Friday, October 9.
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2948 16th Street, San Francisco, California 94103, United States
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