On the Question of the Artistic Transmission of Political Death (II)¹

Abstract

The Curfews period of December 2015 to February 2016 in south-eastern Turkey was a time of collective violence in multiple forms, among which the Cizre Basement Massacres are the most known. The period of the general elections in June 2015, until the later and most recent attempt to carry out a military coup in July 2016, covers multiple curfews and military operations in the south-eastern regions of Turkey, and some social media material shared from the region caught international attention and provoked artistic as well as political responses. Zehra Doğan, a Kurdish journalist and artist, modified and re-shared some footage that was first posted in social media accounts of the special forces in Nusaybin and as a result was sentenced to three years in prison. She continued to produce artworks in prison, even though it was ‘prohibited’ for her to draw. She started to use her own body fluids, hair, newspaper, toilet paper, and any other available daily material in the prison to produce works of art. She also produced a series of work with her menstrual blood. For this article, I conducted two thematic one-to-one discussions with Zehra Doğan and studied her series of works produced with menstrual blood within the scope of mimesis and embodiment theories. Further sections of the article discuss: the function of these series of works for her acting out and working through processes of the collective political violence of which she became both a witness and a victim; methods of artistic transmission of political violence both for the artist and for the audience; and the possible ritualistic functions of using blood while producing work of arts in relation to collective political killings.

Notes

1 This article follows one that was written on the artistic practice and research methodologies of Songül Sönmez during the production of her work titled Forensic Body (2015– 2020). Both articles are outcomes of an ongoing research-creation project titled ‘On Social Death and Mimetic Faculty: A research-creation in the form of a sound theater’ that I have developed as a PhD project and artistic research in different institutions.

2 Zehra Doğan (b.1989, Turkey) is a Kurdish artist and journalist. She graduated in Fine Arts from Dicle University, and she co-curated the JINHA Agency, an all-women press agency. She was one of the first reporters to give an account of the Êzidî women’s enslaving by ISIS. Zehra Doğan was awarded several prizes including the Carol Rama Prize (2020), the Exceptional Courage in Journalism Award from the May Chidiac Foundation (2019), the Freedom of Expression Award in the Arts category from Index on Censorship (2019) and the Rebellion’s Artist in the Worlds Prize (2017) among others.

3 For a chronology of the important events that led to the curfew period, see appendix 1.

4 ‘Even if I had to work with a limited amount of material, due to the prohibition of receiving material for drawing in prison, I knew why I worked with those materials, for example the menstrual blood was something seen as disgusting, bodily liquid which was coming from my deeply hated body’ (Zehra Doğan, personal interview, May 2022).

5 See Appendix 2 for a witness account by an 18-year-old girl.

6 I will indicate all citations from my interviews with Zehra Doğan in quotations but without a note after the first one. All quotations are from the interviews made during April and May 2022.

7 For the real footage shared by the special forces, together with Zehra Doğan’s work, see Voice Project 2019.

8 ‘In July 2016, the day after she left Nusaybin, Zehra Doğan was incarcerated in Mardin. Following a trial, in March 2017 she was sentenced to 2 years, 9 months and 22 days under the charge of ‘terrorist propaganda’ based on the articles she had written and a digital drawing depicting the destruction of Nusaybin by the Turkish army’ (https://zehradogan.net/bio/).

9 All claims are taken from my personal interviews with Zehra Doğan.

10 I am modifying the concept of transitional object by Winnicott (1953).

11 Embodied simulation is a social cognition theory and methodology used in neuropsychiatry to understand in particular how we perceive other’s actions and emotions.

12 In the related passages, Taussig reflects on ethnographical accounting and embodiment, on ‘defensive mimesis’ and ‘spacing out’ by Callois in the context of colonial ‘disembodiment’ during the Enlightenment, and later analyses the idea of ‘spacing out’ as ‘mimetic excess’, which I use here in a rather Benjaminian and therefore post-colonial sense, as a complex faculty of human perception related to tactility, body experience but also to empathy and violence, and the mechanisms of imitiation through which they are learnt.

13 For an elaborated discussion on the topic see P. Auslander’s take on Zamir’s writing on repetition in performance and spectatorship (2018).