The body as social sculpture A Lecture by Cassils

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Cassils, Becoming an Image, National Theater Studio SPILL Festival, London, 2013

With targeted, strictly disciplined strength training, Cassils makes their own body the protagonist of their performances, and contemplates the history(s) of violence, representation, struggle and survival. Drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to social expectations, Cassils speaks about past works and their starting points, development processes and historical contexts.

Cassils, performance artist, bodybuilder and transgender icon, lives and works in Los Angeles. Using their own body as artistic material, Cassils processes influences from feminism, body art and hyper-masculine, homoerotic aesthetics. Cassils eludes binary gender categories and understands and embodies transgender not as a crossing from one gender to another, but rather as a continual process of becoming, as a form of embodiment that works in a space of indeterminacy and ambiguity.

Cassils’s performance Becoming an Image will take place in the Gösserhallen on Friday, 15 June as part of Deep Friday #3. Admission is free. Selected video works will be presented in the Gösserhallen from 13 to 16 June.