The event will be held in Kurmançî with German translation.

Zehra Doğan, born in 1989 in Diyarbakır/Amed, Türkei/Kurdistan, studied art at Dicle University and is co-founder of JINHA, the first Kurdish women’s news agency. Based on a digital painting of the Kurdish town of Nusaybin destroyed by the Turkish military, she was sentenced to 2 years, 9 months and 22 days in prison in Turkey for “terrorist propaganda.” She is the recipient of the Metin Göktepe Journalism Award, the Freedom of Expression Award and the Courage in Journalism Award. To date, her works have been exhibited at the Tate Modern in London and the Berlin Biennale 2020, among others. Named to the Power 100 by Art Review in 2020, Doğan has been an artist in residence at the Maxim Gorki Theater since 2021, where she also presented her first comprehensive solo exhibition, “Prison No. 5,” at the Gorki Kiosk.

In collaboration with journalist Naz Öke, the collection of lettersWir werden schöne Tage sehen. Briefe aus dem Gefängnis” (Nous aurons aussi de beaux jours. Écrits de prison), was published in 2019 by the French publishing house des femmes – Antoinette Fouque. In April 2022, the German translation will be published by Spector Books Leipzig.

About the book:The volume “We Will See Beautiful Days. Briefe aus dem Gefängnis” (Nous aurons aussi de beaux jours. Écrits de prison) gathers the letters that Kurdish artist and journalist Zehra Doğan wrote to her Turkish friend Naz Öke during her 600 days of imprisonment (June 2017 to February 2019). The letters – written in Turkish and translated into French by Naz Öke and Daniel Fleury – are testimony to political violence of which Zehra Doğan and her fellow prisoners were victims. They tell of the conditions of detention in the prisons of Diyarbakır and Tarsus; of the confinement of the prison cells, through whose tiny windows two stars shine every night, but also of the women whose solidarity gives Zehra Doğan strength and whose stories she wants to record in order to draw the world’s attention to the fate of many unjustly imprisoned Kurdish prisoners in Turkey.

In conversation with Havin Al-Sindy

Texts read by: Luna Ali