In the courtyard of Dover Street Market Paris, thirteen towering figures stand – their heat-mapped forms glowing. On view until 24 August 2025, Yulia Mahr’s ‘The Church of Our Becoming’ unfolds as a meandering passage between these three-metre characters whose poised forms recall the quiet gravitas of classical sculpture while honouring the fluid and ambiguous possibilities of the human body. Informed by a background in social science, the British Hungarian multi-disciplinary artist’s work spans sculpture, installation, and lens-based media. In a very personal essay penned for Something Curated, Mahr shares the thinking behind her latest project.
In April this year, the UK Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the definition of ‘sex’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as used in the Equality Act 2010 is ‘binary’ and decided by biological sex at birth, and not gender identity, even if the person holds a Gender Recognition Certificate. Many people of my generation celebrated the ruling, calling it a victory for women’s safety and privacy, and a protection against sexism. I had completely the opposite reaction. I felt dismayed by it. Having experienced a lifetime of extreme sexism, and yes, sexual assault as a child, I would have liked to see completely the opposite ruling: an opening up of the definitions of gender and a broadening out of our acceptance of how people can self-define in the twenty-first century.
I can’t help feeling that some of the considerations behind the ruling, as well as the current rise of more conservative, traditionalist agendas worldwide, are about a dream of returning to a simpler time when we ‘knew what was what’. It’s the past shouting at the future: ‘No, we don’t want to change. There’s safety in how it was.’ But we all know that the rigidly dominant status quo works for the few (almost always the heteronormative male) over the many. We’ve done that. We can only hope for change if we are willing to embrace difference.
I can’t speak to individual journeys of gender transformation here, which are often filled with desperation, rejection and loneliness. These stories need to be heard – but they are not my stories to tell. I can, though, speak to what I see all around me, which is a new generation coming through that have surveyed the landscape of their elders and gone: ‘No thanks, we don’t want any part in replicating what you’ve done before.’ They are speaking loudly and clearly: don’t define us by our gender; define us by looking at us individually. Take me for me. And I personally couldn’t adore the idealism behind this more. Yes, let’s not replicate what has gone before. It may be turbulent for a while, but let’s build a new landscape where each individual gets to decide for themselves where they fit in. If I have faced a frustrating lifetime of being defined and considered in relation to my breasts, why can’t they go: ‘No thanks, define me for me’? We get to choose.
‘The Church of Our Becoming’, currently on view in Paris, is my artistic response to the UK Supreme Court ruling – a glass raised back at J.K. Rowling. In presenting thirteen gargantuan 3.5m portraits in the heart of Paris of people across a broad spectrum of gender definition – from those who are trans, non-binary, fluid, or not at all – this is my celebration of diversity and collective, as well as individual, becoming. It’s my pushback against the rising tide of conservatism and traditionalism, which defines beauty only within a very narrow band of heteronormative standards. No. Not for me. Here is beauty – here it is. And it lies in individual choices over our own bodies and in diversity.
‘The Church of Our Becoming’ isn’t a documentary project; it’s an artistic response to the questions of our day – and so I very deliberately haven’t deployed the tropes of a documentary practice. The images here are dreamy and searching for a connection between us all (and that includes the viewer). For this reason, they are shot with a military-grade thermal camera.
The ‘camera’ is hardly a camera at all, honestly, but a hi-tech heat-measuring surveillance device still predominantly used to enhance the capacities of law enforcement to monitor borders. I’ve been using them since 2010, when I first started to think of converting their dehumanising usage to one of compassion and commonality instead. I was working in the field of visual anthropology at the time and trying to tell my own story of migration and re- homing, but I’m still, to this day, obsessed with the way they can radically transform how we perceive the presence of bodies. The images ask of us to forget all that we’ve been taught about reading an image – and that seems to me to be incredibly apt for this project. In picking up heat rather than light, they emphasise our unique heat signatures and ground my concepts of equality in science. The body as heat, as energy, as shared animal fact: in that radiance, we stand equal.
The series also refers to Greek statuary and their enduring impact on the Western psyche. I proudly join a lineage of artists questioning their prevailing influence. While any reading of Greek sculpture must acknowledge its complexities and nuances, the idealised forms of the Classical Period – the heroic, virtuous, muscular male; the passive, sensual female – continue to cast a long shadow on our collective imagination. These archetypes, resurrected in the Renaissance and codified in Enlightenment thinking, persist in modern advertising, shaping a rather rigid Western concept of beauty and value across fashion and media, and creating a destructive binary for those operating outside its confines.
In referring to Greek statuary, my work here doesn’t reject classical form for the sake of it, but confronts its legacy. My aim in all the images is to open that narrow spectrum of what was once called ‘beautiful’ and ‘good’ and allow it to fracture: into bodies that glow, into identities that exist beyond language, into a vast, generous understanding of what it means to be human. In my world, we are endlessly becoming.