London and India-based visual artist Kirti Virmani creates a mixed media installation of photography, photo-polymer etchings on steel, ceramic sculpture and pigment prints that questions who built the walls designed to enclose women, and whose gaze they were built to control.
The Parkota is a boundary wall, the kind that once enclosed historical cities and forts in India. The one-sided windows in the women’s quarters of those structures were designed to let women see out but never be seen, enclosing them within hollow forms built to manage their visibility and their movement. Kirti Virmani has been thinking about those walls, those windows and the power they encoded. “Who built these structures?” she asks. “Who designed those narrow apertures that allowed women to see out, but never to be seen?”
Do You See What I See? is a mixed media installation comprising photography, printmaking and ceramic sculpture that approaches those questions through material and form rather than argument. Virmani reduces the scale of these architectural forms, merges and distorts them until they become fragile, questioning how architecture mediates access, gaze and power by making those mediations visible and strange. The ceramic pieces range across terracotta, red and white stoneware, each form reconfiguring the massive boundary structures into objects that can be held and questioned. Photo-polymer etchings mounted on steel plates sit alongside galvanised found metal and nails. Pigment prints on Kozo paper, printed in an edition of ten, bring the photographic observations into tactile, intimate form.
“The practice is personal, and the personal is always political,” she says. “It’s personal yet backed by experience of shared community, of feeling the constant gaze, and now thinking about flipping the gaze, about taking control.”
The photographs are observations made from within these sites, reflecting on how men once interpreted women and exploring Virmani’s own ways of looking back.
The work is part of a broader inquiry into holding space, identity and home. Virmani’s solo show Weight of Me, a site-specific installation at ASC Kennington Gallery space in the former Lambeth County Court, opens 18 June 2026.
Kirti Virmani is an Indian-born visual artist based between London and India, working across photography, printmaking and sculptural forms. Her interdisciplinary practice centres on rebellion within and hope.
Website: kirtivirmani.com Instagram: @kirtivirmani8
Do You See What I See?, 2025. Mixed media installation. I: Photo-polymer etchings on steel plates, found galvanised metal, nails. II: Handmade ceramic, terracotta, red stoneware, white stoneware, red iron oxide. III and IV: Pigment prints on Kozo, edition of 10. Exhibited at Muse Gallery, London from 26th June – 13th July 2025
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