CANCELED: The Body as Social Sculpture
Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM), Cassils
April 1, 2020 · 12:00 pm · TBD
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.