Aziza Kadyri spins tales at Pushkin House London and is representing Uzbekistan at the Venice Biennale. She weaves together age-old traditions of textile-making, stories about her female ancestors and latest AI technologies to create thought-provoking interactive experiences.

Shakespeare, rather than Pushkin, makes darting, uninvited entrances and exits in the current work of Aziza Kadyri (b. 1994) at both her current shows in London and Venice. It is hard to pin down this young spinning artist as she travels around the world, through Uzbekistan, China, Russia, and Britain, but she worked backstage in Beijing theatres after studying fashion and textiles, which partly helps explain why all the world is a stage for her.

The show in London adapts itself to the architecture of the Georgian town house, yet it still maintains the theatrical element made clear in the Venice Pavilion. In her pavilion the visitors walk onto a stage and become the players. Masks are beamed onto the visitors’ faces. There is a screaming echo of Greek Choruses here, but the design of the unpaid actors’ new faces, their façades of identities, comes straight from Uzbeki textile design: Suzani! And not just any old Suzani, but Suzani fed by Kadyri into AI. One of the most interesting parts of her show at Pushkin House is the website and on here she has videos of the pattern breeding over and over again. There is a scary soundtrack, but the constantly changing visual language is enough to inspire a composer to write new Enigma Variations.

The exhibition at Pushkin House is thin. Without the digital backup, it consists of textiles, sometimes hanging flags, sometimes clothes or tapestries hung on the walls. The content is fragmentary, but then that is one of Kadyri’s main feminist points: ‘Women navigate silent cues, shaping roles and identities within social expectations.’ For so long male systems have tried to show coherent, linear views of the world. Artificial intelligence is happy to continue and magnify the whispered resistance of generations of women needling away at the brittle beliefs of the past and present. ‘I trained a custom AI image generator to analyse and reimagine Suzani patterns,’ Kadyri says ‘a visual language encoding women’s unwritten stories for centuries.’

We are used to being under the scrutiny of security cameras for much of the time, but stumbling into the spotlight without any preconceived agenda is disconcerting. The empty stage is equally challenging, as are the racks of clothes. The Pavilion catalogue talks of this installation as ‘the interconnected migration narratives shared by young Uzbekistani women.’ The way the clothes are hung is meant to encourage us to think of movement. With their framework, supplied by interconnecting racks and hinted forms they remind me of Francis Bacon’s contorted bodies going through their paces. But Kadyri’s installation does not have the same vitality. It seems dead. It is more like a stage set for Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The viewer is desperate for breath, for a moment of meaning to descend upon us.

Both Beckett and Bacon were masters of the void and absence. There is an element of quoting this exploitation of the human pitched against the void. The empty stage, the empty clothes, the bare structures, are a kind of mirror. Left to our own devices we have to create our own narratives. But Kadyri did not leave us completely alone. The tapestries may be quite spare but that only emphasises the signs and the symbols. One cannot read them like manuscripts but there are plenty of clues.

The website reads well and among other things it relates a matriarchal family history, telling stories of her grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Much of Kadyri’s work directly references her ancestors’ work. ‘The Nine Moons’ hanging in Pushkin House’s stairways is a partial recreation of Oybibi’s dowry. She was one of Kadyri’s great-grandmothers: another great-grandmother came from from Shahs and married a Silk Road merchant, not a great recommendation to the Soviet regime. Much of the magic of Kadyri’s work is that it comes from the family melting pot. The resulting patchwork is an acknowledgement that identity does not just derive from ego and individuality. About the Oybibi dowry work, she writes, ‘the piece is intentionally incomplete, reflecting a centuries-old tradition of leaving embroidery unfinished as a wish for a happy prosperous future.’

Another work in Pushkin House is ‘The Drought’, which is a lament on the drought caused by the Cotton Project, which was a government scheme to maximise the production of cotton. She describes the tapestry as ‘an altar to the vanished Aral Sea’ which dried up as a result of this act of ‘environmental colonialism.’

Kadyri’s use of AI has shown her that it is not immune to colonial bias. As she says, its intelligence is ‘predominantly sourced from the internet, which is often heavily skewed towards content from Europe and North America.’ One suspects that Edward Said would currently see AI and the internet as just one more victim of Colonialism.

Still, Kadyri seems to have found her path away from a post-colonial heritage. In the Biennale catalogue Zohra Saed refers to her own experience of migrating to America, recalling that ‘When my teachers pushed American protocols for girls to be “sugar and spice and all things nice” my Baba kept reminding me to keep my face hard, but my heart soft. To be polite. To be helpful, to be part of the community.’ Kadyri’s art is very much about the community, not only in the way others work with her to produce the work, but in her activist group Qizlar that organises festivals and workshops.

‘Don’t Miss the Cue’ is the title of her exhibition at the Venice Pavilion. It conjures up the anxiety of forgetting one’s lines, of not doing the right thing on stage. After walking out of the exhibition, even though another identity was beamed upon them, the audience might have wondered have I missed something. My sense is that there is more to come.

These two exhibitions of Kadyri bring to mind the early work of the great contemporary Chinese artist, Cao Fei (b. 1978), whose career exploded after she created the virtual RMB city. Kadyri talks of currently exploring the role of the travelling jester, which sounds a little like her own avatar. The empty stage is definitely waiting for some colourful characters. A stage is nothing without drama. In her Venetian catalogue there is subheading ‘Enter, Stage Left’ which is very reminiscent of Shakespeare’s most famous stage instruction in Act III of The Winter's Tale. ‘Exit Stage Left, pursued by a bear.’ I can’t wait for the Bear!