Presented during the 61st Venice Biennale, TURANDOT: To the Daughters of the East reinterprets Giacomo Puccini’s Princess of Ice as a symbol of autonomy and resilience through the work of eleven female artists.

Palazzo Franchetti’s Turandot: To the Daughters of the East celebrates 11 wildly imaginative women artists exploring history and modernity in central Asia and the Middle East

The Brooklyn-based sculptor on how architecture, light, and everyday materials inform her work.

In an age when few dread eternal damnation and the torments of hell no longer function as a deterrent to bad behavior, a stunning exhibition at the Asia Society Museum expands our knowledge of this infernal nether region.

Museums are showing art from across the centuries that tackles core questions, through religious and secular lenses, about what happens when we die.

A look at "Comparative Hell: Arts of Asian Underworlds" on view at Asia Society Museum.

Ranging from the eighth century to the 21st, a show at Asia Society Museum displays Eastern art’s dazzling depictions of the infernal regions.

Most renowned for her seemingly weightless sculptures made of steel, chain, and light, artist Afruz Amighi creates artwork using beautifully ornate Iranian-inspired aesthetics to reimagine connotations of materials and form.

One of the most instantly captivating pieces, Afruz Amighi’s installation “Angels in Combat I” (2010), beautifully exemplifies what seems to be a central thread tying many of the artists together: the appropriation of traditional Iranian decorative strategies to convey political metaphors.

Afruz Amighi is a sculptor and installation artist whose installations use a subtle play of light and shadow.

A few weeks ago, I visited the Brooklyn studio of Iranian-born artist, Afruz Amighi. She works with a type of construction site netting which, in her hands, becomes a kind of diaphanous chainmail casting shadows of ancient Persian warriors, or illuminated carpet patterns that tell a modern story.

Afruz Amighi’s “shadowpieces” are dichotomous structures, aphotic and heavy while ethereal and effused with a gentle light.

Afruz Amighi’s visual vocabulary lies somewhere between light and shadow, between the real and the ethereal.

Afruz Amighi’s “shadowpieces” are dichotomous structures, aphotic and heavy while ethereal and effused with a gentle light.

Afruz Amighi is a New Yorker like Calder (at heart if not by birth, having grown up in the Big Apple after she was born in Iran), and creates sculptures whose lines and shadows culminate in evocative figures that, refreshingly, speak directly of their subjects without the need for explanation.

The Iranian-American artist was the first recipient of the Jameel Prize for Middle Eastern Contemporary Art, back in 2009. For her first solo exhibition in the UK, she creates sculptures and drawings on mylar alluding to female archetypes, with names like The Nun and Knife Girl.

Iranian-American Afruz Amighi’s evocative wall-sculpture combinations of female archetypes and symbolic objects, yielding ‘up-shadows’ to distinctive and somewhat uncanny effect.

Afruz Amighi’s delicate works dance on the walls of Sophia Contemporary for her first solo show in London.