Biography

Yulia Mahr, the Hungarian-born British visual artist, explores the intricate fabric of existence in her multidisciplinary practice encompassing lens-based work, sculpture and installation. With a past marked by geographic displacement, Mahr’s personal history infuses her creative process, resulting in compositions that probe memory, identity, trauma and belonging. Her dedication to community, collaboration and sustainability, drives her latest endeavours, aligning her artistic methodologies with environmental processes to celebrate their impermanence.

Mahr’s remarkable career has garnered widespread acclaim, lauded for seamlessly bridging the realms of social science and art — an achievement underpinned by her extensive academic background in Politics, History, and Visual Anthropology at the London School of Economics and the Freie Universitat in Berlin. Starting her career as a Theatre Director with a focus on issues of human rights abuses, Mahr is now the Founder and Creative Director of Studio Richter Mahr alongside composer Max Richter, and spearheads an innovative incubator for art and music projects.

Recent projects include the widely acclaimed music project VOICES, co-conceived by Mahr and Richter in 2022, with her work extending to co-creating the immersive eight-hour music piece, SLEEP played live at The Sydney Opera House, SXSW, The Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, the Philharmonie de Paris, and the Barbican amongst others. Her films for these projects have variously been selected by Creative Review in their round up of Best Music Videos, been premiered by Aesthetica Magazine and selected by Vimeo Staff Picks. Her photographs have featured in Nowness and her work awarded a Scottish BAFTA. Selected past exhibitions have seen Mahr curating alternative photography from Chiapas, Mexico, as well as work covering the aftermath of the Mozambique war through sensorial ethnography. She has curated weekend festivals of music and film at the Barbican and the Elbphilharmonie. Notably, Mahr curated a retrospective of Mari Mahr’s work for the European Month of Photography at the Kunststiftung Poll.

Yulia Mahr lives and works in Oxfordshire and is preparing to present a solo exhibition of new works in Berlin in April 2024.