Turkish prison cannot stifle Kurdish journalist's art
Imprisoned over her painting of the destruction of Nusaybin, Kurdish Turkish journalist and artist Zehra Dogan continues to produce provocative art that is smuggled to the world outside.
In authoritarian states, artistic expression is an oft-trodden path for expressing dissent. And so Zehra Dogan, a young Kurdish artist and journalist, took to the easel to pour out her emotions about the 2015 leveling by Turkish security forces of Nusaybin, a Kurdish town intertwined with the Syrian town of Qamishli on the opposite side.
In the foreground of her best known piece, an armored vehicle is portrayed as a dark, menacing scorpion-like creature. Humans file resignedly into its gaping jaws. Turkish flags hang over gutted buildings and a giant plume of smoke billows overhead in a perfectly evoked dystopian scene.
