After the Archive, the Body Speaks is a virtual exhibition by Iranian artist Sepideh Takshi, curated by Victor Murari, accessible online through an interactive digital platform. The project brings together video works, immersive environments, generative systems, and algorithmic processes to investigate how digital technologies actively shape what can be seen, recognized, archived, or erased.
The exhibition unfolds across three conceptual axes. The first examines contested archives and the manipulation of memory. The second focuses on the body subjected to algorithmic reading and technologically mediated censorship. The third explores counter-uses of artificial intelligence, opening alternative spaces for narration, participation, and collective image-making.
Central to Sepideh Takshi's practice is the glitch, understood not as a purely aesthetic effect but as a critical and political tool. Algorithmic error, image deformation, and technical malfunction become instruments capable of exposing the fragilities of contemporary recognition systems and the forms of violence embedded within automated classification structures.
Among the featured works is One Thousand and One Nights, a participatory online platform that reinterprets Persian narrative traditions through AI-based generative processes. Through emojis and textual prompts provided by users, the system produces stories and images inspired by Persian miniature painting, transforming storytelling into a dynamic, collective archive in continuous transformation. Within this framework, the figure of Scheherazade emerges as a contemporary paradigm of narrative survival, cultural resistance, and memory transmission within the algorithmic ecosystem.
"The exhibition constructs a critical space in which the digital does not appear as a promise of transparency, but as an unstable territory crossed by conflict, erasures and possibilities of rewriting."—Victor Murari, curator
The exhibition is presented as a curatorial extension of Victor Murari's project Decolonial Atlas: Mapping Artists that Challenge Digital Colonialism.
