A New Banksy Mural in New York Protests the Imprisonment of Turkish Artist Zehra Doğan
On Thursday night, a new graffiti work by elusive British artist Banksy appeared in New York. The 70-foot mural painted across a wall on the corner of Houston Street and Bowery depicts a young Turkish artist named Zehra Doğan behind bars, in protest of her imprisonment at the hands of the Turkish government last year.
Doğan was handed a prison sentence of two years and 10 months in response to her own artwork, a painting that depicted a war-destroyed scene in the Kurdish town of Nusaybin, with Turkish flags painted over devastated buildings. According to TurkeyPurge, a journalist collective that monitors human rights abuses, Doğan had said in a since-deleted tweet: “I was given two years and 10 months [jail time] only because I painted Turkish flags on destroyed buildings. However, they [Turkish government] caused this. I only painted it.” She was charged with being connected to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, an armed group calling for an independent Kurdish state within Turkey.
In a statement issued to The New York Times, Banksy said: “I really feel for her. I’ve painted things much more worthy of a custodial sentence.” In his own mural, which debuted last night with an image of Doğan’s painting projected above it, the anonymous artist used a series of tally charts to illustrate Doğan’s jail time, and one bar is replaced with a pencil, a poignant reminder of the reason behind her imprisonment. Banksy posted the work to his Instagram account Thursday night, sharing the hashtag #FreeDogan.
The New York mural comes during a wave of prominent protest art pieces. Days before the 2018 Oscars, Casting Couch, a solid gold statue of disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, appeared on Hollywood Boulevard; it depicted Weinstein in a silk robe as a reminder of so many of the allegations against him. And earlier this year, guerrilla artist Robin Bell projected the word shithole on the Trump International Hotel in Washington, in response to the president’s offensive remarks about other nations.
