Making one’s own a face without citizenship, a body without respect. This is the sense that guides the production of Zehra Doğan, a modern-day artist and journalist who has been denied any right of expression by her homeland, Turkey. For Zehra, in both her period of imprisonment and her subsequent European exile, the only expressive weapon of her individuality remains her body. That body, however, is never used in performance or spectacle contexts, but rather as a source of pictorial matter. It is a body-instrument, an instrument that is both limited and pushed to its limits. Until January 2025, Prometeo Gallery in Milan lends its space to an exhibition animated by the power of identification with the feeling of another, an other-artist who makes his own artifacts the medium of this intimate form of communication. Ida Pisani, curator and gallerist, following this guideline brings together in a single narrative two artists, different in experience but sharing a similar sensitivity: Zehra Doğan and Matteo Mauro.
Zehra Doğan and Matteo Mauro, “Closed eyes can see”, installation view at Prometeo Gallery, ph. Lily Wolfe. Courtesy Prometeo Gallery
The materials that shape the Kurdish artist’s works include hair, menstrual blood and other organic components that help create a language that defies convention and affirms the specificity of an individual who with her own history and through her scars navigates a world of denied identities and experiences of existential shipwrecks. This bodily condensate is made to interact by the young woman with makeshift objects, such as robes, newspapers, carpets or medicine coupons. A formative and creative relationship thus arises between the remains of a suffering body and mundane products, fragments of the everyday. Through this irreverent dialogue between organic matter and the world Doğan animates «an inlay that holds a vivid memory even in the limit of oblivion», as we read in the critical introduction to the exhibition. In front of her creations, one senses the idea of the art work as memory as well as a claim to resistance and authenticity, elements that are further reinforced by autograph narratives on the back of some of the canvases.
Zehra Doğan, “Scorpio woman”, 2024, mixtures and embroidery on fabric, 139h x 95w cm. Courtesy Prometeo Gallery
In front of the works on display, the viewer is forced to confront the taboos imposed by society and to reconvert his or her gaze from judgmental and scandalized to open and compassionate. Compassion here returns to have a literal meaning: no longer synonymous with pity and sorrow, but sharing the same feeling (con-pathos), that is, the sense of vulnerability. Wounded female figures, captives, mythological creatures like Shamaran emerge from the artist’s drawing hypnotizing the viewer, who feels enraptured by a paradoxical combination of sensations. Indeed, a reference to an ancestral culture-original and synthetic in its features-emerges from the works, but at the same time this rootedness to a distant tradition is betrayed by the unprecedented originality of the pictorial materials and the unique style of their broodmother. Such paradox leads to a profound identification that goes beyond the visible and touches the innermost chords of those who relate to the works. Closed eyes can see indicates, precisely, this momentum toward a silent dialogue beyond visible traces with the destiny of another, Zehra, and at the same time inaugurates an ideal “intuarsi”- taking up the Dantean jargon used in the introductory writing-between the Kurdish artist and a colleague unknown to her, Matteo Mauro.
Matteo Mauro, “Dolce metà”, 2020, bronze, 55 x 53 x 25 cm, Limited Edition [5 + 1 Artist Proof], courtesy Matteo Mauro Studio
The Italian sculptor, boldly introduced to the material conversation with Doğan, invests his work with a conception of the human condition similar to that expressed by the captive artist. More specifically, the human is forced into a kind of intuitable but unimaginable oblivion – invisible to our closed eyes. The complexity of reality from which this state of oblivion derives takes the form of dualism in Mauro’s sculpture: splitting and dismemberment of unity (Sweet Half), being and not being something or an identity (To be or not to be), organic form and inorganic amorphism (Demiurge). Only with our eyes closed, in a language that transcends the visible, we can welcome the coexistence of otherness and always with our eyes closed we can experience that empathy with the universe – an organic-inorganic complex, informal form – of which each of us is a part and whose sense of belonging dissolves into a «shared perception of existence». Empathizing – or intuiting – with the facets of the mundane matryoshka and feeling compassion toward the first among alterities, the human other our fellow human, is the admonition to which Doğan and Mauro’s art appeals to us, even without giving us a clear vision.
Info:
Zehra Doğan and Matteo Mauro. Closed eyes can see
15.11.2024 – 14.01.2025
Prometeo Gallery
Via G. Ventura, 6 – Milano (MI)
www.prometeogallery.com
Graduate in Philosophy from the University of Milan, where she currently lives, she specialized in aesthetics and contemporary criticism. Passionate of the art world and devoted to research, she believes in the potential of the interdisciplinary gaze, which intertwines critical thinking, typical of philosophical backgroud, and the communicative power of art to shape the evolving identity of its time.
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