Utopia III, "Energy Is Fluid"

If multidisciplinary is the buzzword here, the curators chose the venue wisely -- the night included an exhibition of NYC photographer Nick Sethi’s work, titled “Discipline,” and an exquisite food-art installation by Lei Saito. With an intrinsic knack for bringing together an eclectic community of collaborators, artists and devotees of the brand, P.A.M.’s union with The Community serves as a beacon of independent thinking, pioneering a new wave of youth spirit in the typically-monolithic Paris. See the photos from Nick Sethi’s exhibition and the event here.

Utopia III "Energy Is Fluid", launch presented by Perks and Mini and the Lafayette Foundation.

The free Utopia III magazine was curated by Shauna Toohey and Misha Hollenbach of P.A.M.

Superfood landscape by Lei Saito, "Discipline" exhibition by Nick Sethi, and music by Alexis Le-Tan and D.K.

Utopia III contributors: Vito Acconci, @genievefiggis, @dark_white, @seanagavin, Josh Gordon, Taro Hirano, Misha Hollenbach, @jimmangan, Maieu Mercier, Cristina De Middel Puch & Bruno Morais, Shinro Ohtake, Ed Ruscha, @picoristo, @sicknethi, Kishin Sinoyama, Penny Slinger, Josh Smith, @spencernotspencer, @deannatempleton, @caramelbobby, Yamataka Eye.

Art

Jesper D. Lund Publishes CANAL

Originally photographed during breaks from the office magazine studio on Canal Street, the images were edited years later after the publication relocated, resulting in a curated selection of roughly 40 photographs. Spanning quiet street scenes and fleeting observations, CANAL reflects Lund's understated approach to documenting the city that shaped both his work and the magazine's early years.

Art

Unbecoming with Yulia Mahr

June 19, 2026

For the release of her debut monograph, Unbecoming, Yulia Mahr transformed Shreeji News into a celebration of her artistic vision. As a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker, Mahr is best known for bringing together sculpture, lens-based work, and installations that tackle important social issues, such as challenging restrictive beauty standards through her The Church of Our Becoming series. Beyond being an artist, Mahr and her husband run a residency programme to support artists.

Unbecoming continues the creative exploration of her 2024 exhibition of the same name, which was originally shown in Berlin. The exhibition was primarily comprised of black-and-white lens-based works that explore the cyclical nature of life—a continuous transformation from birth to death. Capturing this exhibition alongside more recent works by Mahr, Unbecoming is available at Shreeji News, Marylebone, London, as well as online.

After meeting Yulia on June 5th at the book's opening, I caught up with her to learn more about her artistic world.

Text and Interview by JohnOswald Crichton

Why did you want to recontextualise and expand upon Unbecoming through a book?

Ah, I am a lifelong collector and lover of photography and art books! I adore poring over images, when you can dip in and out of the worlds and work without anyone watching. These gorgeous moments of visual poetry that can stay with you all day. One person’s vision reflecting back at you. I mean a tube journey is just not the same when you are looking at Graciela Iturbide’s work. Or Raymond Meeks. Or your world not as closed when you are reminded of what Theaster Gates has done. Books as small works of art in themselves, that people can carry around with them have such power! So that … and the advice of fellow artists that I followed who have been invaluable in offering reflections on my work and how it evolves.

What conversations do you want people to have in response to Unbecoming?

Unbecoming began as a solo show in Germany two years ago and has evolved out into a universe of work exploring our tendency to love only fragments of life. We celebrate youth but struggle with aging, we celebrate birth but hide death, we celebrate perfection but conceal damage, we celebrate beginnings while fearing endings. Childbirth is hidden, physical damage is disguised, death is ‘unbecoming’. Our old are separated and rejected. Yet these are all things that belong together. These experiences are central to life. As a body of work then it asks whether beauty might exist across the whole cycle (it does!), and rejects our narrow definition of this beauty, concentrating instead on transformation. Decay and decomposition are extraordinarily beautiful processes. Beyond the immediate, if I was to hope for one response to seeing the work, it would be a reflection on how contemporary unchallenged attitudes tied to consumerism and capitalism have ultimately shaped a reduced attitude towards the whole spectrum of existence.

How do you find inspiration for your methods of art-making, and how do you decide which medium best supports an idea?

Great ideas come from honesty and vulnerability. I view success not from a commercial standpoint but from how open I have managed to be. Honestly, things work best when I get out of the way and let ideas flow. When I don’t think too much. But this has to be rooted in a period of ‘composting’ – research, reading, thinking, walking, talking – a constant roving curiosity - that allows ideas to churn and percolate and gain substance. And then you have to just trust that the right ideas will appear. You also have to allow yourself to make mistakes, to go down wrong paths. The best ideas often come from ‘doing’, from material leading the conversation.

I am drawn to deep black, but also gray and muted tones. I can just see better that way, surrounded as we are by so much colour. The world is too cluttered for me. I search for the simple and spacious.

Why do you think challenging and analysing classical art, such as ancient Greek sculpture, is so important?

I am fascinated by classical art and particularly Greek sculpture exactly because it has been so extraordinarily successful. It’s one of the most powerful attempts in western culture to fix a set of ideals … and these ideals continue to influence how we imagine beauty, power, gender and the human body today. You just have to spend five minutes on Instagram to see how these ideas continue to shape how we see ourselves. An extraordinary living, all-pervasive inheritance that continually shapes contemporary dialogue and particularly our ideas on what a normal or valuable body looks like. It’s arguably a vision of bodies that is gaining renewed traction as the world swings to the right.

I am not particularly interested in rejecting the classical canon for the sake of it. I am rather asking what happens when certain ideals become so deeply embedded in culture that they appear natural and inevitable. The question then for me is not whether these sculptures are beautiful. Many of them are, but rather what cultural assumptions and power do they continue to carry and should these be challenged. Just who has been historically included within it, and who excluded. What new stories can be made possible. There’s a whole universe of work I am creating tied to these questions and it’s something that’s still evolving in my practice.

In The Church of Our Becoming, I took the monumental scale, authority and dignity of Greek sculpture (my images are 3.5m tall) but portrayed bodies that the classical traditions have largely excluded or mocked: trans bodies, non-binary bodies, or women as they choose to be represented.

In The Quiet Uncertainty of Stone, I studied damaged classical statuary that were originally sculpted in reverence of youth and beauty, and as an ode to permanence, and argue that the cracked, weathered, composite and aging sculptures as they have evolved over time are far more meaningful.

Could you please tell me about your residency program, and why support for artists at all stages of their careers is so vital?

The residency is built on a simple belief: people matter more than outcomes. We live in a culture and era that constantly asks what value can be measured, quantified or delivered. Art rarely develops in that way. Meaningful work often emerges from periods of uncertainty, reflection, reading, conversation or apparent inactivity. I wanted to create a space that trusts artists enough to allow those processes to happen.

At its most fundamental the residency is a week or two in the countryside at our studio. Composers, choreographers, actors, and musicians tend to use the world-class recording facilities available here or studio space, which we provide for free for Residents or at cost for Visiting Artists. Writers, and artists tend to concentrate around our woodland and the hut spaces we have in the middle of it. Being totally immersed in nature is like a healing balm for creative minds. It’s an opportunity for everyone to unwind, but also to be surrounded by people ‘who get it’, who are on the same journey. While they are working, we are working. We feed folks and look after them. They have access to the vegetable garden and all that’s grown there. There’s a never-ending supply of coffee with a great coffee machine. No-one has to provide us with evidence of work when they leave. It’s just not like that here. While we do tend to ask for a proposal, and look for artists who are truly dedicated, it’s up to the individual artists to decide what they spend time on.

After the residencies are over we try to connect folks either with labels or each other, if it seems like it might help them. We try to offer opportunities for performance where we can. With the composers and musicians, we programme their work as often as possible. We can’t help everyone in this way but have been able to with increasing frequency. It’s about artists helping artists. Away from commercial label or publishing pressure and returning to why we all got into art in the first place. In this way we operate in almost an inverse way from most residency programmes.

We tend to support those that have already published or produced work at some scale – because frankly you may have a book or two out, or an album or two, or seem relatively successful, but rarely are you making a living from your work. Rarely are you receiving the meaningful support and mentorship needed to take you into a deeper practice.

Art

344 Days of Marie Tomanova

June 11, 2026

Marie Tomanova, Czech-born but NY-based artist, cordially invites you to her first solo exhibition show this summer. Three Empty Weeks in July opens for view at the Harkawik Gallery June 12th until July 11th. 344 self portraits of herself throughout the year of 2022, save for three weeks in July. This precise detail, earning the project’s title, unintentionally acknowledges human imperfection, recognizes the incompleteness of identity, and welcomes the idea of failure.

The series is aimed to challenge the Western notion of perfection. When most would answer this prompt with mirror pictures or simple selfies, Tomanova opts to flex her creative photographic muscle. Over a thousand instant films capture her creative endeavor and the range it invites. Tomanova's work is one of captivating compositions that captures color and movement in a special, nostalgia-inducing way. Her photography is rooted in up-close and personal portraits, with this project being the most personal and therefore vulnerable.

Interview and Words by Amara Korinko

Other than the year of taking daily self-portraits, how would you define your 2022?

Wow.

You took an editorial approach to capturing yourself daily, staying true to your expertise. About your Self Portraits in Nature series, you claimed self-portraits must be nude so there’s less layers to hide behind. How do you use clothes to hide and from what?

I am not sure what an editorial approach is; but that categorization doesn’t feel quite right to me, for whatever reason—the project was driven by the concept, the idea of the self-portrait, and consistency. And it wasn't a documentary. Maybe it was about finding myself for myself, or showing myself to myself, for myself. I really felt that in 2021, I had wandered far from having a sense of creativity in my life, so I decided to take a photograph a day for myself. But the consistency was so hard; it really went against my personality; it went against what I visualize as creativity. And maybe that is why I ended-up nude in so many of the images. I was being free against what I had set as a constraint, i.e. the idea of a photograph a day. Maybe I was rebelling against that rule I had set for myself.

What inspired each image composition for the day? Were these ideas you'd been wanting to capture or did the day's events lead to the photograph?

Some days I was super excited to take photographs, and some days I dreaded it. But I had to take photographs because that is what I set out to do. There was no overriding inspiration for the day — the photograph would just happen when it was meant to happen.

I saw this garden in which no matter where you stand you can only see 14 of the 15 rocks that are there, and I thought about this incompleteness of identity and really the folly of completeness or really knowing yourself, or anyone else.

The project is titled Three Empty Weeks in July because you took a consistent break from taking portraits for that time. Yet, this detail emphasizes the theme of human imperfection and the incompleteness of identity. What halted your progress halfway through after staying consistently dedicated, and what motivated the revival?

The ideas of imperfection and incompleteness of identity really emerged in a powerful way through the process of doing this work. And they were something I did not expect. They were not the aim of the project. I found taking a photograph a day to be very difficult at times — like I said earlier, I am not disciplined in that way. I think for some people, such a project would be easy, but for me it was not. And that I was having a hard time is something that was difficult for me to accept about myself—I wanted it to be different. I wanted each day to be a wonderful creative experience that would fill me with deep joy and fulfillment — haha — but it was more like a sword over my head at times, and not in a medieval erotic, or sexy way. But I kept going because I don’t give up.

And then, I just kind of… stopped. And then I was devastated, and then I knew I had to start again. So I did. And I was in Japan and I had tried to get to Ryōan-ji (a Zen rock garden) in Kyoto every time I was in Japan, but I was always so busy in Tokyo with exhibitions, book launches, etc., that I never went. But I finally did in 2022, and I saw this garden in which no matter where you stand you can only see 14 of the 15 rocks that are there, and I thought about this incompleteness of identity and really the folly of completeness or really knowing yourself, or anyone else. And I was inspired. That idea of something being missing went from a sense of loss to a sense of truth.

How much time did you find yourself dedicating to this project daily? Did you find the photos getting in the way of living? Or living because of the photos?

The time spent would all depend; it could be 60 seconds — see a photograph, feel a moment, done. Or it could linger all day, searching, searching, sometimes with half-attention, waiting for that moment, that place, that idea, that feeling. I am not sure I ever lived for the photographs—they got in the way too much for that. Some days I would be very creatively driven, and some days I would be in despair.

With social media and phones, many people choose to document their life — from the routine to the extreme — in digital photos. Do you think people should spend the time and effort taking photos of their daily life, including themselves? What is the balance between living in the moment and preserving the moment to live in again?

I definitely think my phone does not add to the quality of my life. People should do whatever makes them happy. I am moving further and further away from social media. I walk most mornings in Central Park with my tiny little dog and I am so in the moment — today I smelled some roses and watched her swim and fought with her over a stick, and found $60 in the grass, which was the most money I have ever found. For me, these walks are perfect, and I am in the moment. And sometimes, I take photos on my phone so I can share with others these moments, and I guess remember them sometime in the future. The balance between living in the moment and preserving the moment is the balance.

I think it's a human instinct to preserve fleeting things. Good memories preserved in pictures to access later like a physical memory, youth preserved in polaroids, faces known preserved on film, photos themselves preserved in physical album books and digital backup drives. This project preserves yourself everyday for a year. Would you agree, and if so, where do you think our desire to preserve stems from? Alternatively, tell us any thoughts on the art of letting go.

I am so good at letting go. And I wonder if my background has something to do with it. I am from a place — Sudetenland — where there was so much displacement since the 1930s. First it was the Germans and then it was the Communists. Back and forth people were driven from their homes. I didn’t experience that firsthand, but it has been baked into the generation of people there. And I wonder if that filters into me somehow. And I also wonder if why I take photographs is because no one took many photographs of me growing up — I have very few. And yet I am obsessed with taking photographs and they are about self, and memory, and place, and home, and displacement, and of people to who I somehow relate — an empathic mirroring.

Home is a recurring theme in your work and something else I think humans are obsessed with the preservation of. We all have the home we’re born into and a home we build for ourselves. You are home to Europe but built a home in NYC; what sensation does “home” give you? What sensation did you feel when you knew you had found it?

I am still so confused by this idea of home. And for me, almost on a daily basis, I still feel torn, or at least pulled, between places. Place and home has been such a big part of my work. My 2018/19 It Was Once My Universe work was all about returning home to Czech after being unable to go back for 8 years and the disjunction I found being there — I had been gone too long, but also I hadn’t; it was still home. I had changed. And these themes are still ones I work with regularly, as recently as a museum show in Czech in which I unpacked the archive of my room into the space of the museum. I wonder how Three Empty Weeks relates to ideas of home.

Did the project help reveal something about your own life/self to you?

I travelled a lot in 2022. Sometimes, I look back and I cannot believe how much I have done — and I see it in the photographs. Photographs are magical in so many ways. It is easy to forget that today. The biggest thing the project revealed to me is this idea of the never complete self and the acceptance of that as the process of living — that is growing.

From so much time taking and analyzing pictures of yourself, did you grow closer to your body/appearance or did you find it more foreign?

This is actually something I do not think about, but it is a great question to think about in terms of one’s body and their relationship to it. And it is a very difficult question to think about. The relationship people have with their own bodies is so personal.

I intentionally shot the entire series on instant film. So it exists the way it was photographed, no changes, no tweaks, no retouching. I wanted to capture and see myself as I am. My goal is to continue this body of work and photograph myself for a year every five years. It’s a mission that I am excited about even though I know I will struggle with it. But the longevity concept in projects are very valuable to me. And I think over time it will bring even more questions about self acceptance. Or maybe not. We will see.