Leili Tehrani Walker: In the Shape of Another

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.