There is a subtle yet tenacious epistemic violence in the way the West has transformed Turandot. Born as Nasrin Nush in twelfth-century Persian literature — in Nezami Ganjavi's poem Haft Paykar (Seven Beauties), a woman of inaccessible wisdom, not ornamental cruelty — the princess traverses centuries and languages until she becomes, in 1710, an imaginary Chinese woman in a French adaptation constructed to satisfy the Enlightenment palate with the thrill of the exotic. Then Puccini takes her, drapes her in lacquer and silk, seats her on an imaginary throne that belongs to no real geography, and delivers her to the history of opera as an emblem of the mysterious, impenetrable, feminine East in the most stereotyped sense of the term: beauty that kills, intelligence that frightens, otherness that must be tamed.
Turandokht, in Persian, means simply daughter of Turan. Turan is a historical and geographical region — one that today encompasses Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, with extensions toward Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, and Iran. Not an Orientalist abstraction: a place. Eleven artists come from that place, or from adjacent geographies, or from the exile that originates there. And Ziba Ardalan — founder of the Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art and curator of this exhibition that marks the foundation's international relaunch — brings them together in Venice, within the splendid Gothic-Venetian architecture of Palazzo Franchetti on the Grand Canal, to restore to Turandot the name that was taken from her, the voice that was overwritten, the geography that was replaced with an invention.
The Palace as Counter-Stage
Choosing Palazzo Franchetti as the venue is not a logistical detail. Venice was for centuries the physical crossroads between East and West, the commercial and cultural hub through which the goods, ideas, and imaginaries of Central Asia entered Europe. The roads that Marco Polo travelled, the Silk Road routes that passed through Samarkand and Bukhara, all arrived here. The palace on the Grand Canal — with its frescoed rooms, marble floors, and light refracted from the water — is itself an archive of that centuries-long hybridisation: a place that held commercial power, elaborate aesthetics, and exchanges that today we would call intercultural, and that then were simply economic necessity.
To bring eleven artists from Central Asia and the Eastern regions into this palace is to perform a symbolic inversion of considerable precision: no longer the East arriving in Europe as commodity or fantasy, but as creative subjectivity occupying a historic space of intersection and depositing its own testimony there. The exhibition coincides with the centenary of the world premiere of Turandot at La Scala in Milan in 1926 — and this hundredth anniversary is not celebratory but interrogative: what remains, a century on, of the original theft? What has the West done with that story, and what does it give back?
Eleven Voices, a Single Sovereignty
The eleven artists in the exhibition — Lida Abdul, Afruz Amighi, Huma Bhabha, Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, Mona Hatoum, Saodat Ismailova, Madina Joldybek, Nazira Karimi, Daria Kim, Farideh Lashai, Tala Madani — do not form a stylistic unity or a shared programme. What they have in common is deeper and less articulable: an existential condition belonging to those who have produced art from subjectivities that the Western art system has long treated as peripheral, as exotic otherness, as a secondary voice relative to the centre that grants itself the right to name and catalogue.
Lida Abdul, Afghan, brings her video work into a context in which the word Afghanistan immediately evokes destruction, occupation, collapse. Her practice works precisely against this reduction: in her videos, bodies and ruined architectures are treated with an almost liturgical care, as though the aesthetic gesture itself were an act of resistance against oblivion. Saodat Ismailova, Uzbek, artist and filmmaker of extraordinary intensity, weaves Sufi tradition and avant-garde cinema into installations that seek within the depths of collective memory something older and more resistant than the narratives that contemporary borders impose.
Mona Hatoum — Palestinian, born in Beirut, in exile in London since 1975 — has been for decades one of the most radical voices in contemporary art. Her practice transforms domestic objects into devices of latent menace, revealing the fragility of what we call home when home has been destroyed or rendered unreachable. To present her Hotspot III here — a steel and neon sphere reproducing the world map lit in red, like a globe on fire or in permanent alert — is to place at the centre of reflection the question of the border as geographical violence: who belongs where, who has the right to remain, who is expelled.
Huma Bhabha, born in Karachi and based in the United States for decades, constructs sculptures that resemble relics of unidentified civilisations — hybrid, hieratic figures, worn by time even when brand new. Her work carries the weight of bodies that find no representation in dominant narratives: neither entirely Western, nor reducible to the category of "Third World art." Farideh Lashai, Iranian, who died in 2013, participates posthumously through paintings, video, and recorded words: her presence is one of the most significant curatorial choices in the show, because it introduces into the exhibition the dimension of a voice that outlives the body that produced it — and no figure is more apposite than Turandot, setting aside the symbolic reversal, for thinking about the female voice as an entity that transcends whoever carries it.
Madina Joldybek, Kazakh, brings her textile and sound works — Milk Road (2025–2026) — constructed from material traditions belonging to the nomadic culture of the Central Asian steppes. Textile as language: every thread that passes through a warp is an act of transmission, every pattern is a sentence in a language inherited through the hands before it reaches the words. Tala Madani, Iranian-American, brings through her darkly comic and unsettling videos a critique of male power that requires no statement of intent: her characters move through grotesque universes where control and submission perform themselves to the point of revealing their own structural absurdity.
Said, the Palace, and the Reversed Mirror
It is impossible to visit this exhibition without thinking of Edward Said and his analysis of Orientalism as a system of knowledge production in service of domination. Said described how the West had constructed the East not in order to know it but to define itself by contrast: rational against irrational, progress against tradition, civilisation against barbarism. Turandot is a textbook case of this mechanism: the Persian princess transformed into a Chinese woman, rendered cold and cruel to make her conquest by the Western hero more thrilling — Calaf, the unknown prince who pierces her mystery with the answer to three riddles.
Ardalan's exhibition performs a radical reversal of this schema: it does not respond to Orientalist domination with the romantic celebration of an authentic otherness — which would be the other face of the same exoticism — but with the concrete, material, irreducibly individual affirmation of eleven artistic practices that have no need to define themselves in contrast to anything. These artists exist. Their work exists. Their aesthetic and conceptual sovereignty is not a concession granted by the Western art system: it is a fact of reality that the Western art system has for too long ignored or distorted.
Venice — the city that brought spices, silk, porcelain, mathematical ideas, and musical instruments from the East, and then resold to Europe the controlled thrill of the exotic — is the geographically most honest place in which to pose this question: what would the West have been without what it took from the East? And what did it do with what it took?
The Silence That Was Never Silence
TURANDOT: To the Daughters of the East is not an exhibition about the silence of women. It is an exhibition about the tireless production of these women despite the systems — political, religious, colonial, of gender — that have sought to impose that silence. The urgency here is not that of humanitarian emergency: it is that of an artistic intelligence that has never stopped working, creating, questioning, regardless of whether anyone noticed or not.
Turandot, in her original Persian version, is not the cruel princess who sends suitors to their deaths. She is a woman whose intelligence is so far superior as to be incomprehensible to the world surrounding her, and who chooses — chooses, does not endure — her own inaccessibility as a form of self-determination. She does not need to be tamed. She needs to be heard.
The eleven artists of this exhibition share that same quality: they do not wait for recognition from the centre to legitimise their work. They are already here. They were already here. Within the Gothic rooms of Palazzo Franchetti, surrounded by Venetian water that for centuries has carried the currents of the world back and forth, their silence that was never silence becomes at last — and at last is the right phrase — audible.
TURANDOT: To the Daughters of the East
Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art
ACP–Palazzo Franchetti, San Marco 2847, Venice
9 May – 31 October 2026
parasolunit.org
Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art
ACP–Palazzo Franchetti, San Marco 2847, Venice
9 May – 31 October 2026
parasolunit.org
