Opening Preview & Panel: UN SEEN ME
UN SEEN ME — Dr Shanali Perera
The Journey from Clinician to Canvas
How do you see me? Me, the person? Me, the illness — or both?
UN SEEN ME brings together acrylic, digital and hybrid works exploring the space between what is experienced and what can be seen.
Drawing on Perera's dual perspective as a former physician and patient-turned-artist, the exhibition asks how we might see the person beyond the diagnosis.
Through intense colour, layered surfaces, expressive palette-knife marks and fragmented forms, subjective experiences of pain, change, identity and embodiment are translated into a visual language that moves between the personal and the universal.
To preview the 'Living, Loving, Mess' collection artwork and read the artist's full statement, visit unseenme.carrd.co
UN SEEN ME asks viewers to encounter the person behind the diagnosis — and to consider what becomes invisible when illness is allowed to dominate how another human being is seen.
“I am not the illness. I am a person first.”
The exhibition poses another question born from Perera's unusual trajectory from medicine into contemporary art:
What happens when the person who was trained to look clinically becomes the person asking us to look differently?
The opening preview on 19 November will extend these questions through a live interdisciplinary Panel: SEEING BEYOND THE VISIBLE, bringing together voices from across contemporary art to explore who gets seen, how we represent lived experience, and when the deeply personal becomes culturally significant.
The discussion will explore visibility and representation, the clinical and lived body, adaptive creativity, and when intensely personal experience transcends autobiography to acquire wider cultural and curatorial significance.
Following presentations during the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, the Women in Art Biennale London 2024, and ahead of Perera's return to Venice during the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026, UN SEEN ME brings her evolving interdisciplinary practice into a focused solo presentation in Manchester. Having begun developing her digital art and narrative practice in 2015, Perera now works across acrylic, digital, mixed and hybrid media, using art to examine lived experience beyond conventional biomedical language.