Dr Shanali Perera brings acrylic, digital, mixed-media and hybrid practice together for UN SEEN ME, a new solo exhibition at SEESAW, Manchester in November 2026.
How do you see me? Me, the person? Me, the illness – or both?
Bringing together original acrylic paintings alongside digital and hybrid work, UN SEEN ME marks the first complete presentation of Perera’s Living, Loving, Mess (2021–2026) collection – a five-year body of work tracing illness, resilience, connection and transformation. 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.
Drawing on Perera’s dual perspective as a former physician and patient-turned-artist (we explain more about this in a previous article), the exhibition explores the space between what is experienced and what can be seen. 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.
Perera began developing her digital art and narrative practice in 2015. Having started with digital work and now working across acrylic, mixed and hybrid media, she explores how emotion, embodiment and human relationships can be made visible – moving between the personal and universal, clinical and creative, biomedical and human, visible and invisible.
At its heart is a challenge to the way illness is represented. Rather than presenting the body simply as an anatomical or clinical object, 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 transformation from clinician to patient to artist
A Private View on 19 November will extend these questions through a live interdisciplinary panel 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.
The public exhibition will run 20, 23 & 24 November 2026, 10 am – 4pm at the SEESAW (admission is free).
Following up from presentations 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 later in 2026, UN SEEN ME brings her evolving interdisciplinary practice into a focused solo presentation in Manchester.
Pictures provided by Dr Perera.
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