Sepideh Takshi: A Global Voice in Digital Art
As a National Portfolio Organisation funded by Arts Council England, The Plough supports a Visual Arts programme that engages with artists responding to current social, political and technological shifts. In a period shaped by rapid developments in digital technologies such as VR and AI, artists working in digital media contribute important critical perspectives to these transformations and offer us a guiding light.
Sepideh Takshi is an artist and researcher whose work has been exhibited internationally, from Contemporary Art Gallery KARST in Plymouth to venues in Dubai, Italy, Russia and Los Angeles. She began her career in 2015 with a series of exhibitions in Tehran. Her recent UK exhibition took place in Leicester as part of Robots for a Safer World, a digital arts festival.
Her digital work Compost, which examines glitches that occur as digital entities merge, was selected for The Wrong Biennale (2025/26) pavilion by three curators from France, the UK and Argentina. It appeared in the UK pavilion, alongside another work, Digital Double, which was presented in the USA pavilion.
Takshi works closely with archival material to inform her digital practice. These investigations frequently interrogate historic narratives, particularly in relation to decolonisation. Her work is multi-sensory and interactive, inviting audiences to reconsider established narratives through digital means.
One example is Decolonisation Archive, presented within the Digital Double pavilion at The Wrong Biennale (USA). Takshi begins with an archival gesture: an old handwritten manuscript is translated into a digital double, not as a preservation tool but as a method of decolonisation. By constructing a digital twin of a historically situated text, she questions the authority of the original archive and reveals its embedded power structures. The butterfly motif within the work addresses the historical tendency to frame certain subjects primarily through aesthetic value, drawing attention instead to overlooked complexity, resilience and embodied agency.
Decolonisation Archive offers a visual framework through which audiences may engage with ongoing discussions surrounding representation, gendered aesthetics and historical categorisation.
Takshi’s broader practice explores the shifting boundaries of identity as digital entities intersect with physical and psychological experience. Her web-based project One Thousand and One Nights, inspired by Scheherazade’s narrative survival, generates texts and images from user-selected inputs, functioning as a digital double of the literary source and forming an evolving, algorithmic archive. Drawing on elements of Persian miniature painting, the project reflects on how storytelling, authorship and cultural memory are reshaped within digital environments.
As our lives perpetually morph amidst these hybrid physical-virtual identities, there is no doubt that Sepideh Takshi's work presents an opportunity to be guided, often sensorially, through the emerging and unfolding dilemmas they present to us. Her work addresses the relationship between digital media and socio-political structures, examining how technology mediates voice, visibility and narrative control. Rather than offering definitive answers, Takshi’s projects open space for reflection on how emerging digital systems influence embodiment, authorship and collective memory.
Grace Rodgers, Curator, The Plough Arts Centre.
The Plough is in conversation with Sepideh Takshi regarding an exhibition in Spring 2027 - Announcements will be made via the Plough website.
Read more about Robots for a Safer World here
and watch an extract of Decolonisation Archive here.