Anali Taherian is a London-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores memory, identity, and the emotional dimensions of human experience. Drawing from personal history, family photographic archives, and lived experience, she creates works that move between representation and psychological space, transforming familiar images into layered reflections on perception, remembrance, and belonging.

Working across painting, drawing, and mixed media, Taherian investigates the ways in which memory is constructed, fragmented, and reimagined over time. Her compositions often blur the boundaries between portraiture and abstraction, using color, gesture, and materiality to evoke emotional states rather than fixed narratives. Through this approach, she creates visual environments in which personal and collective histories intersect.

Originally from Iran and now based in the United Kingdom, Taherian's work is informed by experiences of cultural displacement, transition, and adaptation. Her practice reflects an ongoing engagement with questions of presence and absence, intimacy and distance, and the relationship between individual memory and broader cultural narratives.

What if a portrait did not tell a story? What if it refused to point toward a fixed meaning, a recognizable narrative, or a stable identity?

In Storyless, Anali Taherian presents a series of portraits that move beyond representation and the language of signs. Rather than depicting individuals defined by biography, social identity, or circumstance, these works engage the viewer through sensation, affect, and embodied experience. Faces dissolve, features shift, and familiar forms open into passages that lead beyond the surface of the image.

Dark eyes become openings. Mouths transform into fissures. Lines fragment and expand. Throughout the exhibition, the portrait is no longer a site of recognition but a space of encounter. Taherian's figures resist enclosure within the picture plane, reaching outward toward the viewer and establishing connections that operate beyond language, narrative, and conscious interpretation. Rooted in processes of free association and emotional resonance, the works invite viewers to experience the paintings not as representations of particular people, but as expressions of a shared human condition. Here, bodies communicate through feeling rather than symbolism, creating moments of intimacy that emerge directly between the artwork and the viewer. Rather than offering stories to be decoded, Storyless opens a space where sensation precedes meaning, and where new forms of connection can emerge through the act of looking.