Cassils

Cassils is a Canadian transmasculine artist whose practice spans performance, photography, video, sculpture, and installation. The body is not merely the subject of the work, but a somatic, political, and material instrument through which violence, resistance, transformation, and regimes of visibility are critically examined.

Through physically demanding actions, prolonged endurance performances, the use of light, fire, darkness, and processes of bodily transformation, Cassils challenges how transgender bodies are seen, represented, and consumed by the public gaze. Their work resists any comforting or fixed representation of identity, instead foregrounding the ethical responsibility of the viewer and the power dynamics embedded in acts of looking.

Cassils’ practice often stages the body as both archive and battleground, where histories of marginalization, queer resistance, and embodied survival are made visible through strain, impact, and endurance. By pushing the limits of physicality, their performances expose the fragility and strength of the body as a site of political inscription.

This tag collects articles, interviews, and critical essays on Cassils, their contribution to contemporary performance art, the politics of visibility, the ethics of spectatorship, and the body as a space of resistance, transformation, and radical presence.

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