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?Sri Lankan-born Manchester-based interdisciplinary contemporary artist and former physician asks How do you see another person — and what remains unseen when illness becomes the lens?UN SEEN ME marks the first complete presentation of Living, Loving, Mess (2021–2026), Shanali Perera's inaugural acrylic collection. Developed over five years, the series traces a journey through illness, resilience, connection and transformation, introducing the visual language that has become the foundation of her contemporary interdisciplinary practice.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 — through a contemporary visual language that moves between the personal and universal; clinical and creative; biomedical and human; visible and invisible.
Drawing on Shanali's dual perspective as a former physician and patient-turned-artist, UN SEEN ME navigates the chaotic, fragmented and beautiful realities of the human body while living alongside chronic illness. Moving away from the objective clinical gaze, the work establishes a visceral and deeply empathetic visual vocabulary through which subjective embodied experience can be seen differently.
At its heart lies a simple assertion:
I am not the illness. I am a person first.
And a question:
How do you really see me?What happens when the person who was trained to look clinically becomes the person asking us to look differently?Look at the art. Look at the experience. Look at the person.
And question how you are looking.Pause. Feel. Connect.
See beyond what meets the eye.
UN SEEN ME — Dr Shanali Perera
Opening Preview & Panel:
Thursday 19 November 2026
6pm – 9pmPublic exhibition:
20, 23 & 24 November 2026
10am – 4pmSEESAW, 86 Princess Street, Manchester M1 6NG
