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.
The Chapel of Becoming is generously supported by The Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation and the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Arts Impact Endowment as a part of The Lab’s residency programs.