Leila Weefur: The Chapel of Becoming @ The Lab

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.  

The Lab’s exhibitions are open Thu-Sat, from 12pm - 5pm unless otherwise noted, and are free and open to the public.

Concurrently with The Chapel of Becoming, The Lab is presenting the following events:

Sat., October 10, 2026 at 1pm
Jack Halberstam and Leila Weefur in conversation, preceded by a reading by Cameron Awkward-Rich, co-presented with the GLBT Historical Society & Archives as part of the Trans Negativity Symposium at UC Berkeley.

Sat., November 21, 2026 at 8pm
Songs, Sermons & Sacred Voyeurism in collaboration with Chani Bockwinkel.

As an iterative, itinerant installation, a prototype of The Chapel of Becoming was presented in another installation setting at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as part of Bay Area Now 9.