The Church Of Our Becoming

Spotlight about Yulia Mahr’s exhibition at Dover Street Market Paris, 24 July – 24 August.

From 24 July to 24 August, Dover Street Market Paris becomes the site of an invisible anatomy, a place where bodies are not seen, but sensed. In ‘The Church Of Our Becoming’ , Yulia Mahr employs thermographic photography to strip away the visual noise of surface and gender, exposing a shared emotional core. This transformative contemporary art installation dismantles classical ideals and reimagines beauty through connection, not confrontation. “Here is beauty,” Mahr writes, “and it happens when we no longer take gender or identity as givens.”

What if a military-grade technology could be reimagined as a means of human connection?
What if it became the raw material for artistic expression?
What if the classical ideals of Greek statuary, those archetypes of corporeal perfection, were not preserved, but reworked to reflect new visions of beauty?
And what if, for once, photography chose not to capture surfaces, but the private, pulsing undercurrent of what lies beneath, the unseen intimacy, the visceral emotion?

This is the essence of Yulia Mahr’s latest work, now on view at Dover Street Market in Paris.

The iconic courtyard, long a space for projects, installations and events, once again sheds its skin, transforming into a pathway of large-scale posters and photographs. A visual dialogue of chiaroscuro and silence. A chromatic tension that creates an almost sacred aura, where icons and figures become invitations to inner reflection. A call to dismantle beliefs, judgements, and mental constructs.

“The Church Of Our Becoming” is the new photographic project by multidisciplinary artist Yulia Mahr. Her subjects are captured through thermographic techniques that pierce beneath the surface, revealing inner energy, human warmth. The body is not portrayed as a fixed, defined object, whether male or female, but as a vessel for impulses, emotions and connection.

Thermography does not record the external shell, but instead captures energy, temperature, and inner flow. Each image becomes a manifesto of shared humanity, a visual echo of life coursing beneath the skin, invisible yet ever present.

The poses deliberately evoke classical Greek statuary, not to imitate or criticise, but to recall and reinterpret. Classical ideals of perfection, male musculature, feminine curves, are neither idolised nor rejected. They are questioned. There is no single truth, no absolute standard. Beauty is released from its classificatory function and transformed into a fluid, mutable, identity-driven expression.

A dialogue unfolds between past, present and future, a temporal reconnection that invites us to move beyond traditional aesthetics and open ourselves to new perceptual horizons.

Dramatic tones, intense contrasts, near-monumental dimensions: everything works together to reframe our perception of the body and of subjectivity. The viewer is drawn into this new visual landscape, moving among images that carry the weight of the sacred and the pulse of revolution.

The artist’s intervention extends across sensory levels, from the visual to the olfactory,  with the creation of an artistic box for the new fragrance capsule collection Max Richter x Comme des Garçons.

Yulia Mahr is a truly multifaceted artist, whose work delves deeply into the human existential condition. She explores the profound interconnections and great dualities of life: birth and death, freedom and constraint, union and separation. Her images are emotional nerve fibres, systems of connection between bodies and consciousnesses. She dissolves exteriority as a rigid shell to reveal what vibrates beneath.

She transforms decay, what is decomposing, into fertile matter. She returns it to life, as both artistic and human gesture.

The Church Of Our Becoming / Yulia Mahr

Credits

Artist: Yulia Mahr / @yuliamahr
Venue: Dover Street Market Paris / @doverstreetmarketparis
Photos by: Maurits Peeters / @mauritis.peeters
Words: Annalisa Fabbrucci / @annalisa_fabbrucci
Editor: Maria Abramenko / @mariabramenko

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