Materials- Artist Research: Zehra Dogan

Zehra Doğan is a Kurdish Turk artist who was born in Diyarbakır, Turkey in 1989. She was one of the founders of JINHA, Turkey's first women's news agency that was shut down by a government decree in 2016. Dogan was detained in Mardin for sharing the pictures she drew during the curfew and security operations in the Nusaybin district of Mardin on social media and reporting the notes of a 10-year-old boy. Doğan, who was sentenced to 33 months in prison for propaganda of a terrorist organization, was arrested in June 2017 and sent to Diyarbakır Closed Prison. During her stay in Diyarbakır Prison, the prison administration did not give Doğan the crayons and paints Doğan wanted for painting. Doğan responded by making paints from materials that were available- plant roots and menstrual blood- and producing paintings. The prison administration did not give Doğan the books sent by her lawyers and friends, saying it was "forbidden". Her mother and sister brought clothing for Zehra to paint on and snuck her artworks out of prison because she was not allowed to produce them and this was the only way for Dogan to share her art with a wider audience.

In her artworks produced during this period Doğan also used her own and friend’s menstrual blood and body hair. In Islam this liquid is forbidden. Menstruating women cannot enter religious places, cannot cook, and even if they cook, it is said that they will not be fruitful. This is because it is haram (prescribed by Islamic law). In the artwork "EZ Zehra" the colours red and black are dominated which are very sinister colours associated with death, blood and anger. Period blood surrounds the crouched female figure on the bed sheet. The blood stain on the bedsheet and crouched position reminds me of a woman lying on a bed. In my opinion, the overused amount of blood reflects her accumulated pain. She has been put on this bed and her blood spreads uncontrollably. It is like a metaphor created over the prison bed. “That bed exists even when we're out. They always locked us in that bed. The women who are outside sleep on that bed every day, being ashamed of themselves. That prison bed is everywhere.” When she dismisses the natural cycle of women as disgusting, she is left alone with herself, with her regret and pain. Additionally, this could also connote that she is not ashamed of her own nature. She objected and shed her menstrual blood, almost like saying, “I am Zehra Dogan, I do not regret that bed.”

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