Leili TEHRANI WALKER
IN THE SHAPE OF ANOTHER
18.07.25 ~ 10.08.25
In the Shape of Another, is a reflection on identity, memory, and selfhood in an age of digital performance. Across nine paintings, seven mirrors, and a multimedia installation, Walker resists the pressure to present a unified or knowable self. Instead, they propose identity as something fluid, relational, and ultimately unknowable.
This body of work begins with a feeling: frustration at the way online spaces demand a marketable persona. In response, Leili turned towards opacity, drawn from philosopher Édouard Glissant, who argued for the right to remain unknowable, especially in the face of systems that seek to define and control.
Each work in the exhibition begins with a photograph. These images are digitally manipulated and then rendered in layers of oil, pastel, gouache and acrylic. The result is a series of stylised, often placeless compositions. In Orchard Rd, Walker and their mother appear as anonymous figures in a flattened landscape. In Roslyn Gardens and Easey St, identities blur further, faces erased, figures absorbed into their surroundings. Rather than depict themselves directly, Walker paints the people who shape them. Through this gesture, the exhibition draws on Charles Horton Cooley’s theory of the “Looking Glass Self”, the idea that we form our identities by imagining how others perceive us. As the exhibition progresses, the figures recede. By the final painting, Enghelab St, they are barely visible in the corner of the canvas. The installation that follows, Self and Trace (2025), uses cameras and mirrors to shift the question of self onto the viewer. Who are you, and how are you seen?
What begins as an act of resistance evolves into something more expansive. In embracing relationality Leili opens space for multiple selves to coexist. In the Shape of Another is not a conclusion but an unfolding, an invitation to imagine identity as layered, collective, and ultimately uncontainable.
All whom you see here is what I am
Anna Emina
In the winter of 2022, when all I could do was visit exhibition after exhibition searching for something I could not name I found myself in front of The Secret Way (El Alamein) 2022, a painting by artist Leili Walker. I was enchanted by it all. The way the dark green and blue hues engaged confidently, almost self assuredly against the energetic and vibrant orange. The way the lights in the windows, and on the signage, were all lit, energising the cityscape. How the oranges, like a stream of water, cascaded down the stairs, as though it is where they had always belonged. The fact that there were no doors, only windows, in which you are free to enter, left me limitless as to where I could go. All these feelings, strangely take me back to the surreal and dreamlike landscape of The Mysterious Voyage of Our Homer, an episode of the Simpsons where Homer, having eaten an insanity chilli, goes on a trip to find his soul mate. Unlike Homer, there is no space coyote guiding me through the many possible cosmic and endless universes. All of it, the freedom, the multitudes of meaning, the expansiveness of this one painting left me perplexed when three years later — almost to the day I first encountered The Secret Way — Leili tells me that in the real world, they have been forced to contain their expansiveness, carve off parts of themselves into a perfect saleable commodity, dictated by an online algorithm.
