Zehra Dogan's Prison Drawings on View at Brescia's Santa Giulia Museum

The Museo di Santa Giulia in Brescia, Italy, is hosting the exhibition 'Avremo anche giorni migliori. Opere dalle carceri turche' featuring sixty works by Kurdish artist Zehra Dogan, created during her 1,022 days of imprisonment in three Turkish prisons (Mardin, Diyarbakir, Tarsor). Dogan, born in Diyarbakir in 1989, was sentenced to three years in prison for a sarcastic drawing posted on Twitter that reinterpreted a photo of the Turkish conquest of the Kurdish city of Nusaybin. The charge was incitement to terrorism. Her situation was aggravated by her work as a journalist, including reporting on the persecution of Yazidi women in northern Iraq, and her co-founding of the JINHA news agency in 2010, which was closed in 2016. The works, made on improvised supports such as textile and paper with materials like cigarette ash, tea, menstrual blood, turmeric, rocket juice, and pomegranate peel, show influences from European painting between the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and Pablo Picasso. Curator Elettra Stamboulis notes that French culture has been influential in Turkish art schools. The drawings feature tangled human and animal figures, metamorphic visions, and the iconographic theme of the eye, typical of European Symbolist-Surrealist culture and Eastern tradition. Dogan now lives in Europe and looks to the future, thinking of her homeland Kurdistan.