Yulia Mahr at Comme des Garçons, Paris
Client
Year
Location
Comme des Garçons / Dover Street Market Paris
Project
Role
Exhibition design, project visualizations, installation
The Church of Our Becoming, a body of work by artist Yulia Mahr, was presented in its monumental scale at the courtyard of Dover Street Market Paris. Estudio Rotondo assisted the artist with exhibition design and project visualization.
Captured using a military-grade thermal camera, the portraits reclaim and reimagine classical ideals of the human form. The works trace the radiance of living bodies—trans, non-binary, otherwise fluid or not at all—offering a vision of equality as energy rather than identity.
"Becoming’ began its life in the time I spent examining Greek statuary’s fascinating afterlife in the Western psyche. The idealized forms of the Classical Period (the heroic, virtuous, muscular male; the passive, beautiful, sensual female) continue to cast a long shadow on our collective imagination. Some of my models identify as trans, some non-binary, others more fluidly. My aim is to open up that narrow column of what is often 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."
Images: Maurits Peeters and Rotondo.