On a significant date as March 8, 2022 (from 5pm), Prometeo Gallery ida Pisani – via Ventura 6, Milano, will host the closing event of Zehra Doğan’s exhibition Prison n°5 by presenting the book Avremo anche noi dei bei giorni, edited by Fandango Libri.

Special Guests: the curator of the exhibition Elettra Stamboulis and the distinguished foreign signature of the Corriere della Sera, Marta Serafini, who is a well-known international relations and terrorism expert.

Avremo anche noi dei bei giorni collects the letters that the artist and journalist Zehra Doğan has sent, during her last 600 days in jail, to Naz Öke, a Turkish activist who animates the information web magazine Kedistan, in Paris, for the freedom of expression.

Naz started writing to Zehra on June 15, 2017, just a few days after the permanent arrest of the latter on charges of terrorist propaganda (which took place on June 12, 2017). Following that, the artist was taken to Diyarbakir’s prison (Turkey).
Although they never met in person, a deep friendship was born between the two women. As a matter of fact, on Naz’s starting lines of her first letter to Zehra, she writes “I've been trying to write to you for two days, then I reread and start over again and again. On June 12 it seems like black clouds have fallen from the sky above us”. However, as the title of the volume published by Fandango Libri recalls, the hope has never been extinguished in the soul of the young Kurdish artist.

Indeed, it is during these months of detention that Zehra has continued to create by organizing a "painting studio" with her co-inmates. There, thanks to brushes made with bird feathers knotted with her hair, she has painted on clothes and sheets using fluids and organic materials such as food remnants and menstrual blood,

Right until her release from Tarsus’s jail on February 14, 2019, Naz has sent her more than a hundred letters.

On March 8, 2022, Elettra Stamboulis, curator of the exhibition Prison n°5 - the artist’s second personal exhibition at Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani - will retrace Zehra's detention experience by emphasizing the solidarity shown towards the artist by the international cultural world: from Banksy to Ai Weiwei to Riccardo Muti, from the Tate in London to the Drawing Center in New York to the Gorki Theater in Berlin. As Stamboulis notes, these letters are written in Turkish to make them understandable to her friend Naz. They are therefore: "Written in the language of the oppressor, the language of the school, which requires you to forget who you are, as Zehra often told in the meetings with the public after her release”.

Finally, the other special guest of the finissage will be the journalist of ‘Corriere della Sera’ Marta Serafini who will insert the volume and the epic of Doğan within a broader international context.

The finissage will be free admission (in compliance with current health regulations) and will take place in the halls of the gallery that host the original letters by Naz Öke and Zehra Doğan's answers from prison, in the form of writing and drawing.