From Feb. 20 to May 16, 2026, MACTE - Museum of Contemporary Art in Termoli (Campobasso) is hosting a solo exhibition of Zehra Doğan, Kurdish artist, activist and journalist. An exhibition project that traces the main stages of her research, from the pre-prison period to her most recent production. From Feb. 20 to May 16, 2026, MACTE presents I, Witness, a solo exhibition by Kurdish artist Zehra Doğan, curated by Francesca Guerisoli. The exhibition, housed in the museum’s spaces on Via Giappone, offers a wide-ranging journey through different types of works, including painting, drawing, video, photography, graphic novels, dolls, installations and tapestries, offering a comprehensive reading of the main junctures of the artist’s research.
Born as an artist, activist and journalist, now a political refugee in Berlin, Zehra Doğan conceives drawing and image as tools of witnessing. Her practice has developed in close relation to biographical experience and a political engagement that has had direct consequences on her personal and professional life. Convicted and imprisoned for her journalistic work and for a piece documenting the destruction of the city of Nusaybin, Doğan transformed the experience of imprisonment into a space of production and resistance.
The prison period represents one of the central cores of the exhibition project. Deprived of traditional art materials, the artist developed an essential and necessary visual language born of deprivation and the need to continue expressing herself. In this context, the artistic act takes on the value of a gesture of survival, self-affirmation and speech taking. Within the exhibition, the female figure occupies a central and recurring position, configuring itself as the main symbolic core of Doğan’s research. A vulnerable yet powerful body, the figure traverses different registers, from childhood to the mythological archetype of the snake goddess, shaping a hybrid and metamorphic presence. In this image is concentrated a possibility of transformation, regeneration and resistance that opposes the devices of control and violence inscribed in the individual and collective history of women.
The works exhibited are characterized by a layered construction in which materials, signs and narratives overlap. This process returns works that stand as spaces of shared memory and relationship, capable of holding together biography and history, personal experience and collective responsibility. In Doğan’s work, a strong symbolic dimension is intertwined with a clear social and political tension, while realism and archetypal visions coexist in chromatically intense compositions. The path of I, Witness traverses three key moments in the artist’s life: the pre-prison period, the prison experience and more recent production. The works presented include Prison No. 5, a graphic novel that was created clandestinely in Diyarbakır Prison and is now offered as an installation. The work was created by drawing on the back of letters received from the outside, testifying to a practice that has been able to adapt to the conditions of imprisonment, and that has transformed material limitations into an integral part of the creative process.
Zehra Doğan, born in 1989 in Diyarbakir, Turkey, lives in Berlin and works as an artist in Europe with a nomadic practice. She trained in the Fine Arts program at Dicle University and is co-founder of JINHA, the first news agency composed exclusively of women. As a journalist, she followed the war in Iraq and Syria on the ground and was among the first to collect the testimonies of Ezidi women freed from slavery by Isis in northern Iraq. After clashes between the Turkish army and the PKK began, she was sent to cities under curfew, including Cizre and Nusaybin.
In July 2016, she was arrested in Mardin, the day after her departure from Nusaybin. After five months in pre-trial detention she was released under judicial supervision, but at the end of her trial in March 2017 she was sentenced to two years, nine months and twenty-two days in prison for “terrorist propaganda” in connection with her journalistic activity and a painting about the destruction of Nusaybin. The sentence was upheld on appeal in July 2017 and Doğan was jailed. In October 2018, the Turkish state ordered a forced removal measure against her, and the artist was transferred to Tarsus Prison, from which she was released on February 24, 2019.
Doğan has received numerous awards over the years, including the Metin Göktepe Journalism Award, the Rebellion’s Artist in the World Prize, the Freethinker Prize from the Swiss association Frei Denken, the Courage in Journalism Award from theInternational Women’s Media Foundation, the May Chidiac Foundation’s Exceptional Courage in Journalism Award, the Hypatia Prize of Excellence for Women - International Section, and the First Carol Rama Prize. She has participated in exhibitions and exhibition projects in international institutions such as the Tate Modern in London, the Drawing Center in New York, the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin, the Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia and the MACC Foundation in Calasetta, as well as the Pontevedra Biennial. She is the author of the volumes Avremo anche noi dei bei giorni. Writings from Prison, published by Fandango Libri in 2022, and Prison No. 5, published by Becco Giallo in 2021.
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| I, Witness: Zehra Doğan brings art born of imprisonment to MACTE |
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