Sepideh Takshi: A Global Voice in Digital Art
As a National Portfolio Organisation, funded by Arts Council England, The Plough is committed to providing a dynamic Visual Arts programme that gives platform to artists working to address the current social, political and technological shifts taking place across the globe. As these revolutions bring us the dilemma of how best to lean into new digital technologies such as VR and AI, artists working in digital media can offer a guiding light.
Sepideh Tashki is both an Artist and Researcher who has held exhibitions worldwide - from the studio space at Contemporary Art Gallery KARST which is near to her home in Plymouth, to Dubai, Italy, Russia and Los Angeles. At the start of her career in 2015 she held a series of shows at galleries in Tehran, close to where she was born. Her most recent UK exhibition took place in Leicester as part of 'Robots for a Safer World', a digital arts festival: https://sandracrispart.com/index.php/computala-2026/
Her digital work Compost, which explores the glitches occurring as digital entities merge, was selected for The Wrong Biennale pavilion in 2025/26 by three curators (from France, the UK, and Argentina) and appeared in the UK pavilion, alongside another of her works, Digital Double, which appeared at the same time in the USA pavilion.
Sepideh works closely with Archives to inform her digital practice. These explorations often lead to unique interrogations of historic narratives, around Decolonisation for example. Her vibrant and exploratory work is multi-sensory and interactive, offering digital gateways to diverse audiences, inviting them to engage with traditional narratives in new ways. One example is demonstrated in her piece titled Decolonisation Archive, featuring a butterfly. She explains that the butterfly is a creature often misrepresented in historical depictions, which too often focus on aesthetic beauty rather than the awe-inspiring mechanics of its physicality. This serves to highlight the strength and agility behind creatures that have been assigned, labelled and catagorised as primarily 'things of beauty' by the imperial taxonomists and their assumed ownership of these multi-faceted creatures.
Decolonisation Archive offers a valuable visual lens through which the multi-generational audience passing through, for example, a typical community arts gallery, might find resonance with current dialogues around stereotypical female vulnerability and aesthetics. This theme may strike an association within the lyrics and messages being platformed in areas of more familiar mainstream popular culture such as through the music of global icons such as, for example, Taylor Swift - who also appeals to audiences where several generations experiencing them can find commonality and allow conversations to evolve.
Sepideh's work presents new perspectives in answering questions that arise around our boundaries of identity, as digital entities merge with our mental and physical selves. Her work undoubtedly offers guidance as we learn to navigate our way through them. She created and developed the web app One Thousand and One Nights, inspired by Sheherazade and her nightly storytelling as an act of survival. The platform generates narrative texts and illustrations from user-selected emojis and genres, functioning as a digital double of the book, a living, global archive rebuilt through algorithmic processes. The visual language draws from her Persian heritage, and carries inspiration particularly from Persian miniature painting. Her work creatively explores how we evolve and enhance our cognitive capabilities as technology presents new ways of navigating and morphing with these digital environments and the instantly-available variations made possible through AI.
The Artist's experience of growing up as a woman in a country that has a history of oppressing women's voices is something she expresses powerfully through her digital work, as well as her paintings. She offers a poignant and timely perspective amidst the volatile waves of oppression currently sweeping the globe. Her talent for using digital media as a tool to address these socio-political dilemmas deserves to be seen and heard. With possibilities for individual expression narrowing in geographical areas where internet-dependent communication can be controlled so easily by the state it is becoming ever-more crucial that creative public platforms in countries such as the UK host valuable and diverse human stories that originate from areas where this is becoming less easy.
As our lives morph though physical identities, to virtual and digital ones, there is no doubt that Sepideh Takshi's work holds potential to guide us sensorially through the unfolding dilemmas presented to us. Her cutting-edge work continues to offer visitors new ways to navigate these emerging hybrid, digital-physical landscapes we find ourselves in, and the dilemmas they present to us all as we evolve through them together. It is exciting to watch how her work embraces the quickening pace of these changes and morphs alongside them.
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.