At Dover Street Market, Paris, Greek philosophy and surveillance technology illustrate queer bodies

I adore the way these ‘cameras’ call into question everything we have been taught about how to read an image, compelling us to look again. And how in picking up heat patterns, rather than surface details, they allow us to look below the surface at our commonality. They’re a perfect fit for this project. If these cameras are used to detect ‘abnormal’ bodies and to single them out as threats, then I thought, well, I can find a way to subvert this to instead celebrate and open up binary rigidity. In picking up heat over light, the camera roots my ideals of equality in science – the body as heat, as energy, as shared animal fact. In that radiance, we stand equal, and therefore I have also included cis women and men in the project – this is a series about all of us and my total conviction of the beauty of plurality.

DA: Tell me a bit about the link between Classical European sculptures and statues and your photos. Why is this connection important?

YM: Well, as I mentioned before, it was really one of the starting points for the whole series. I’ve been doing work on Greek statuary for a couple of years now, all the time fascinated by their enduring impact on Anglo and European notions of beauty. While any reading of Greek sculpture has to acknowledge its complexities and nuances, the idealised 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.

Artists have, in various ways, engaged with the dominance of Greek ideals before, but it remains an urgent conversation, especially so now as we return to an algorithmically induced obsession with ‘ideal’ and normative bodies. I’m using the thermal camera very deliberately to penetrate surface and superficial judgments. I’m also very deliberately breaking with Greek notions of balance, or contrapossto, or in fact leaning into these ideas to subvert them. And then of course the people I am portraying turn any notions of gender or female submission and passivity on their head.

I’m driven to take space for those who are otherwise marginalised. Each portrait stands at almost 3.5 m height – that’s very deliberate from me – I want to put queer and trans bodies into public spaces, into a space they deserve. Additionally the Greeks saw monumentality as a sign of the divine and I love that for this work too. We are all part of the divine. The monumental no longer has to serve nationalism, masculinity, or control, but becoming, softness, multiplicity.