Leila Weefur: The Chapel of Becoming

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.