From February 20 to May 16, 2026, the MACTE Museum of Contemporary Art in Termoli presents "I, Witness," a solo exhibition by the Kurdish artist Zehra Doğan, curated by Francesca Guerisoli. The exhibition offers a detailed journey through paintings, drawings, videos, photographs, graphic novels, dolls, installations, and tapestries, retracing the main points of the artist's research and highlighting a practice deeply intertwined with biographical experience and political commitment.

Artist, activist, and journalist, now a political refugee in Berlin, Zehra Doğan conceives drawing and imagery as tools of testimony.

Sentenced and imprisoned for her journalistic work and for a piece documenting the destruction of the city of Nusaybin, she transformed the detention experience into a place of production and resistance. From deprivation arises an essential and necessary visual language, in which the artistic act asserts itself as a gesture of survival, self-affirmation, and speaking out.

Within the exhibited works, the female figure takes on a central role, configuring itself as the main symbolic nucleus of her research. A vulnerable yet powerful body, it ranges from childhood to the mythological archetype of the serpent goddess, shaping a hybrid and metamorphic presence. In this figure, there is a possibility of transformation, regeneration, and resistance that opposes the control and violence devices inscribed in the individual and collective history of women.

The works, constructed through the layering of materials, signs, and narratives, testify how confinement has never interrupted the artist's voice but, on the contrary, has intensified its urgency: they become 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 intertwines with a clear social and political tension: realism and archetypal visions coexist in powerful and chromatically intense compositions, reflecting the lived suffering, the strength of resistance, and the vitality of Kurdish culture.