Artificial Intelligence and Digital Colonialism in Sepideh Takshi’s Virtual Exhibition

The current international debate centered on artificial intelligence systems, data flow management, and modern digital control methodologies finds a point of convergence in the new virtual exhibition titled *Sepideh Takshi: After the Archive, the Body Speaks*. The exhibition, curated by Victor Murari with digital production by Thayani Costa, is presented as an online experience accessible via a dedicated interactive platform (clickhere for the online exhibition).

This digital space brings together the video works, three-dimensional environments, generative structures, and algorithmic processes that characterize the recent body of work by Iranian artist Sepideh Takshi. The exhibition aims to analyze and bring to light the technological infrastructures that govern contemporary society, with a particular focus on criteria for automatic cataloging, practices of technical censorship, and the ways in which images and collective memories are processed in the age of advanced computational software.

The exhibition project serves as a direct curatorial extension of a previous research project conducted by Murari himself, titled *Decolonial Atlas: Mapping Artists that Challenge Digital Colonialism*. The theoretical core of the initiative lies in the need to understand how today’s digital devices have moved beyond the purely representational function of reality to become active agents, capable of determining what qualifies to be displayed, validated, archived, or, conversely, removed from digital flows.

In Takshi’s view, the very institution of the archive is stripped of any claim to objective neutrality, reduced to the realm of an unstable territory subject to dynamics of opposition, erasure, and constant reconfiguration. The artist employs tools such as artificial intelligence, extended reality, three-dimensional scans, coding, and the design of virtual environments to highlight the asymmetries and distortions of technological systems, demonstrating how every visual structure entails dynamics of selection and the exercise of power.

A key methodological element in the artist’s work isthe use of the glitch. This digital anomaly transcends its purely aesthetic or decorative connotation to take on a specific critical value and political significance. Algorithmic errors, the decomposition of the image, and the disruption of technical devices’ functioning become scientific tools for exposing the vulnerabilities of modern recognition systems and the forms of forced coding inherent in protocols for the automatic cataloging of subjects.

The exhibition is organized around three distinct conceptual strands. The first section focuses on the examination of controversial historical archives and the processes of alteration in documentary memory. The second section directs the investigation toward the human body as it is subjected to data cataloging and the filters of automated censorship. The third section, on the other hand, explores alternative and antagonistic methods of using artificial intelligence, aimed at creating new narrative forms and collectively structuring the visual imagination outside traditional commercial channels.

It is within this framework that the specific project titled One Thousand and One Nights is situated—an interactive platform that reworks the structure of traditional Persian narrative through the application of automated generative models. The public can enter text and emojis, which the computer system processes in real time to produce texts and visual representations based on the conventions of Persian miniature painting. The narrative is thus transformed into a mutable and constantly evolving documentary archive. Within this mechanism, the historical and literary figure of Shahrazād serves as a reference model for the processes of memory preservation and cultural resistance within algorithm-governed circuits.

Sepideh Takshi’s work is situated within a field of research that openly challenges the impartiality of digital media. The artist does not use technological devices merely as supporting tools; rather, they are themselves the subject of an analysis that reveals their cultural and political repercussions. In a historical era marked by the saturation of visual content and the dematerialization of physical storage media, Takshi’s methodology takes on particular significance as it focuses on disruptions in visual systems, on undocumented segments of memory, and on elements that software tends to exclude or reduce to predefined standards. The exhibition aims to set aside technocratic perspectives and delineates a framework in which technology is a realm marked by erasures and redefinitions of the documentary record.

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