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Zehra Doğan is a Kurdish artist and activist known for having been arrested and sentenced for publishing on social media one of her paintings, portraying the destruction of Nusaybin after the clashes between the security forces and the Kurdish rebels. During the 1,022 days she spent in three different Turkish prisons (Mardin, Diyarbekir and Tarsor), she succeeded in making many works using all sorts of supports and materials (cigarette ash, menstrual blood, curcuma). The use of recycled materials and supports – such as the carpet in Shahmeran and the map of the Ottoman Empire in Kurdistan 3 – characterizes her output after that period as well.

The suffering that resulted from her imprisonment triggered within the artist the urgent need to give physical shape to her states of mind, drawing from that great image incubator that is the dream. The result of this was the tangle of human and animal figures brimming with allusions to Kurdish mythology, as well as the visions on continuous metamorphic dynamism. An intrinsic part of these works is the invitation to fight against the patriarchy of Kurdish society that led this artist and many other women to endure harsh imprisonment.

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