UN SEEN ME at SEESAW

It’s not often you hear of someone jumping from a career in medicine to one in contemporary art. For Dr Shanali Perera, the move has afforded a unique perspective. As a former physician specialising in rheumatology, her job was to read pain, symptoms and diagnoses – but biomedical language, she felt, was insufficient to capture the full experience of her patients. Developing a digital art and narrative practice over a decade, Perera now works across acrylic, digital, mixed and hybrid media, revealing the people behind the pathologies and exploring the space between what can be seen and what is experienced.

The exhibition marks the first complete presentation of Living, Loving, Mess, Perera’s first acrylic collection. Five years in the making, it traces illness, resilience, connection and change through intense colour, layered surfaces and expressive palette-knife marks – visual representations of subjective experiences of pain, change and identity. These striking paintings are shown alongside digital and hybrid media exploring how emotion, embodiment and human relationships can be made visible – moving between the personal and universal, clinical and creative, biomedical and subjective.

There’s a resistance at work throughout the exhibition. Perera’s work pushes back against the idea of the body as a diagnosis waiting to be made, shining a light, instead, on the person underneath it. “I am not the illness,” she says. “I am a person first.” In doing so she asks viewers to sit with everything a clinical gaze might miss – an interesting proposition from somebody who was once trained to see the body as anatomical object. But there’s another tension here: in the same way you can reduce a person to an illness, you can also reduce a person to their experience of an illness. How, Perera asks, can contemporary art can make subjective, embodied experience visible without reducing the person to the experience being represented?

The show was presented during the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 and 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. It opens with a preview evening on 19 November, including a short panel discussion bringing together voices from across contemporary art to talk about visibility, representation and when personal experience becomes something with wider cultural weight – a question the show is built to test. Public days follow on 20, 23 and 24 November, all free to attend.