Parasol unit is relaunching its acclaimed international exhibitions programme, in Venice during the 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia: In Minor Keys, with a group exhibition of works by eleven significant female artists from Central Asia and wider regions of the East. Curated by Dr Ziba Ardalan, the exhibition TURANDOT: To the Daughters of the East will be presented in the historic from 9 May – 31 October 2026.

The exhibition features both new and iconic artworks that span multiple genres, from video work by Lida Abdul, Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, Daria Kim and Tala Madani, installations by Afruz Amighi, Saodat Ismailova, and Nazira Karimi, sculpture by Huma Bhabha and Mona Hatoum, painting, video and spoken words by Farideh Lashai, textile and sound work by Madina Joldybek. These eleven artists engage profoundly with human, societal and global concerns, addressing themes as diverse as existence, myth, and history.

Turandot is certainly one of the most complex and enigmatic figures in world mythology, literature and opera. Her story traverses centuries, languages and artistic forms, all the while reflecting ongoing cross-cultural hybridity and reinterpretation.

The earliest known versions of the Turandot tale appeared in Persian literature, notably in the twelfth-century epic work Haft Paykar (Seven Beauties) by Nezami Ganjavi (1196 AD. In one of his romantic tales the poet writes of a far distant Slavic/Russian princess, Nasrin Nush, whose wisdom and inaccessibility make her seem distanced and cold-hearted. Gradually, as the story migrated via oral and literary traditions, it accumulated ever more layers of meaning and symbolism. The name Turandot first appeared in a 1710 retelling of Nezami’s tales by François Pétis de la Croix who, having translated them from Farsi into French, chose to depict her as a Chinese princess. Her name and character seem to have been modified to fit Western Enlightenment-era fascination with the ‘exotic’ East. Two centuries later, Giacomo Puccini skilfully fused the Turandot tale with the Italian dramatic tradition to present one of music’s most dramatic operas to a global audience.

A common given name for Persian females, Turandokht in Farsi means daughter of Turan, an historical and geographic region northeast of Iran. Known today as Central Asia, Turan includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, which together with other regions such as Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, Turkey and Iran, have at times been integral parts of the Persian Empire. Although considered arch-rivals throughout antiquity and the early Middle Ages, Iran (settled) and Turan (nomadic) were intricately intertwined through their history and culture.    

The exhibition TURANDOT: To the Daughters of the East pays homage to women artists from those geographical regions, whose individual and collective histories and works reveal their strength, convictions and creativity. Together, they honour the voice of Turandot as remarkable, intelligent and confident women.

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Hera Büyüktaşciyan
The Dream of a Falling Star

In her layered film The Dream of a Falling Star (2019–2023), Hera Büyüktaşcıyan explores the tensions between absence and presence, sound and silence, erasure and resistance. By retracing apocalyptic histories through the morphology of stone, she reflects on how matter bears witness to time.

Continuing her investigation into contested histories, territorial divisions, and space as a repository of memory, the work draws on a recorded dream from the memoir of a Livissi expatriate, describing undefined forms falling from the sky onto the village. Now known as Kayaköy, this site in southwestern Turkey, within the ancient Lycian region, has remained abandoned since the population exchange following the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922.

Through phantasmagorical imagery, stop-motion sequences, and site-specific footage, Büyüktaşcıyan reconstructs the village as a layered, dreamlike narrative in which earthly and celestial elements converge. The film drifts between ancient dreams, fallen meteors, and constellations, alongside petrified bodies and reawakening voices, forming an anthropomorphic procession. Architecture and landscape emerge as witnesses to time: each hollow, crack, and wall takes on a skin-like quality, transforming traces of departure into an expansive cosmological form that bridges the perishable and the non-human within cycles of existence.

Here, the dream becomes a space of revelation—where hidden truths surface and the lithic silence of a turbulent past unfolds through the petrified imprints of an abandoned village, carried on oneiric waves.