Turandot — Madikendraws

Madina Joldybek
artist & educator

madikendraws@gmail.com

Milk Road, 2025–2026
Hand-tufted wool, cotton
Dimensions variable.

TURANDOT: To the Daughters of the East - Collateral Event of the 61st Venice Biennale.
Presented by Parasol Unit
ACP–Palazzo Franchetti, Venice, 2026

Design technology: Ming Huen Keung
Installation: Venice Art Factory

Milk Road is a textile work that reimagines maternal lineage as a thread of resilience, tenderness and memory. Drawing on the enigmatic nature of Turandot – shaped by centuries of reinterpretation – Joldybek approaches her not as a fictional character but as a composite image of women. Perhaps Turandot, too, was a daughter of the Steppe – born of silence and song.

In Central Asian tradition, grandmothers pass their good wishes and wisdom to their daughters and granddaughters through Tus kiiz – sacred wall hangings carrying ancestral blessings. In Milk Road, this gesture is reversed. Here, the artist sends blessings to Turandot and to the grandmothers she never had a chance to meet – honouring their life-giving work. These tufted rugs offer gratitude from a descendant to her foremothers.

The rugs incorporate archival photographs printed on cotton of Central Asian women breastfeeding in the early twentieth century. These textiles feature motifs of tulip, saxaul, wild garlic, apple – plants native to, or historically rooted in, the Central Asian landscape. In her works, the artist often draws parallels between plant milk and breast milk, portraying both as substances that heal, soothe and nourish life on Earth. Milk, in this piece, carries memory. Milk is healing, milk is superfood, lactic galactic – each star a droplet of milk. The first taste of life is history passed from body to body. What stories lived in that milk? Joldybek suggests that beyond the storied Silk Road lies another hidden path – the Milk Road, a network of women’s invisible labour, binding generations through care and endurance.

Just as Turandot became an exotic fantasy for the West, some of these plants also entered the world through the lens of fascination and extraction. The tulip – now globally cherished – was first gathered in Kazakhstan, though few imagine its origins in the Steppe. The same dynamic shaped the archival photographs of Central Asian women breastfeeding, produced during colonial expeditions. Woven into Joldybek’s rugs, these images reveal a double gaze: ethnographic curiosity from outsiders, and the quiet return-gaze of women whose everyday labour was never meant to be spectacle.

This work does not seek to resolve the enigma of Turandot, but to imagine her anew – not as a cruel riddle-setter, but as a daughter of the East shaped by the same histories of giving and erasure. Milk Road becomes a tribute to all the unnamed Turandots whose strength continues to flow through us – in the milk, the blood, the lullabies – in the quiet history passed down through women, and carried still.

Photography: Rosa Tiryaki, Giacomo Papaccio, Francesco Allegretto