Zehra Doğan's Milan Exhibition Features Prison Art and Kurdish Resistance

Zehra Doğan (Diyarbakır, 1989) presents a solo exhibition at Galleria Ida Pisani in Milan, showcasing works created with materials of resistance: frayed, colorful carpets from 2021 stained with coffee, tea, menstrual blood, and other liquids—materials she used in prison where canvas and brushes were unavailable. The carpets depict rows of women united in sisterhood. In a second space, large sheets display horrific images of torture in Turkish prisons, drawn on the back of letters smuggled out to her friend Naz Oke, forming her graphic novel 'Prigione N.5.' Doğan was imprisoned in 2017 for drawing the destruction of Nusaybin with Turkish flags and tanks as monstrous forms; a court deemed the drawing 'beyond the limits of criticism,' sentencing her to 2 years, 9 months, and 22 days in Diyarbakır prison. Her imprisonment mobilized international public opinion and the art community: Banksy dedicated a mural to her in New York in 2018, and Gianluca Costantini made a portrait. Doğan describes the impulse to create in prison as 'a survival reflex'—the process of creation is salvific even if the final object is ephemeral or destroyed.