A DAY AS A WITNESS

| by MonnaLisa Salvati |

I stepped into Zehra Doğan’s world quietly, with the respect and sensitivity I felt were necessary and appropriate when confronting the pain of yet another unjust war, the silenced abuses, and the injustices inflicted upon men, women, and children. You need to arrive emotionally prepared, with a spirit willing to be engaged – and even overwhelmed – by what the artworks evoke.

“Io, Testimone” (I, Witness) Zehra Doğan’s exhibition curated by Francesca Guerisoli and currently hosted at the MACTE in Termoli IT, cannot leave anyone indifferent. Not even the distracted eye of a casual visitor can fail to grasp the Artist’s cry of protest, as she bears witness to the suffering caused by war. A living witness, I would add, since as a correspondent she first reported on – and later paid with imprisonment for exposing .- the devastation of war. Accused and convicted over an artwork documenting the destruction of the Turkish city of Nusaybin, Doğan spent nearly three years imprisoned in Tarsus Prison. Deprived of any painting materials, she devised a way to use the backs of letters sent by a friend to create the work that later became part of the graphic novel presented as an installation opening the exhibition.

The sequence of images narrates the abuses suffered by Kurdish women inside prison cells, but also the solidarity and resistance they enacted together. Smuggled out of prison clandestinely, these materials ultimately became both testimony and denunciation of prison conditions. The visitor’s gaze moves from one image to another, like frames in a film, frenetically recounting the lives of these women – at times lingering on expressions of pain and scenes of violence, yet also on acts of rebellion and manifestations of female solidarity. In the same room stands a carpet scarred by burn marks, a sign of something rescued from destruction. During her work as a correspondent, the artist collected numerous objects from looted homes, saving them from certain ruin and restoring to them the symbolic value of testimony.

One room is dedicated to the work My Mother’s Missing Woman, four dolls created in collaboration with her mother and sister. It is a silent dialogue between a mother and her distant daughter, shaped by hope and the longing for her release from prison – a kind of exorcism of death itself. Upon pristine white fabric, strands of hair and menstrual blood intertwine to create three medium-sized works recounting cruel and painful experiences such as arrest and murder. In striking contrast, images of young girls searching for an enchanted garden emerge as a clear sign of hope for the future. This series, Caught Between Borders, once again places the female figure at its center.

The solidarity and cooperation among women became tangible during Doğan’s detention through the creation of a newspaper, painstakingly handmade on sheets of paper by Doğan and her cellmates after the closure of the Turkish newspaper for which she worked. Its pages recount the harsh conditions endured in prison. Here too, the cry of protest resounds powerfully.

Two separate sections are devoted respectively to a 2016 video in which Doğan denounces society’s blindness in pretending not to see the many wars raging across the world, and to the projection of eighty photographs shown on a loop, bombarding viewers with images of a besieged people struggling to preserve everyday life amid war, destruction, violence, and death. Here it is Zehra the journalist, through the lens of her camera, who meticulously documents the devastation.

The exhibition also features the presentation of an unpublished graphic novel, Nusaybin and Cizre, shown to the public for the first time. Begun in 2015, it was interrupted by the artist’s imprisonment.

The exhibition closes with a textile painting, Shahmeran, the serpent goddess, which becomes a symbol of hope for the construction of a fairer society – one in which the longed-for emancipation of women may finally become possible.

At the end of this extraordinary journey through Zehra Doğan’s artistic universe, I like to hope that today I too may contribute, by becoming a witness to the reality she continues to denounce, always and no matter what.