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. At the center of the Chapel is a new video installation entitled On Devotion, in which Weefur treats everyday actions as forms of devotional practice, bringing together trans* community members including pioneering historian and theorist Susan Stryker. Imprinted into the architecture of the Chapel is an archive of 900 ceramic tiles imprinted by hand with the floor plans of religious structures across centuries, continents, and devotional practices. Cascading from On Devotion out across the gallery space, Weefur’s archive of tiles provide an expansive notion of devotional practices and structures—one which is always in-progress, becoming, troubling the notion of stability and closure.

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 the anarchitectural ethos of which Matta-Clark was a foremost practioner, 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. A companion performance work, Songs, Sermons & Sacred Voyeurism, developed in collaboration with artist Chani Bockwinkel, will be presented in November.

Friday, October 9, 2026 from 5–9pm
Opening reception for The Chapel of Becoming.

Saturday, 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.

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

Leila Weefur is a Liberian-American artist, writer, and curator whose work engages with film, architecture, and the archive to examine systems of belonging. Their research, across disciplines, explores environmental geographies, transnationalism, religion, and queer worldmaking. Weefur has worked internationally with institutions including the Walker Art Center, Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, ICASF, CCA’s Wattis Institute, SLASH Gallery, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the African Diaspora, and The Kitchen. Weefur was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2024 and completed a residency with the Bemis Center for the Arts. Weefur’s writing has been published in SEEN by BlackStar Productions, Sming Sming Books, Baest Journal, and more.

The Chapel of Becoming is supported by the San Francisco Arts Commission and the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation. 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.