In authoritarian states, artistic expression is an oft-trodden path for expressing dissent. And so Zehra Dogan, a young Kurdish artist and journalist, took to the easel to pour out her emotions about the 2015 leveling by Turkish security forces of Nusaybin, a Kurdish town intertwined with the Syrian town of Qamishli on the opposite side.

In the foreground of her best known piece, an armored vehicle is portrayed as a dark, menacing scorpion-like creature. Humans file resignedly into its gaping jaws. Turkish flags hang over gutted buildings and a giant plume of smoke billows overhead in a perfectly evoked dystopian scene.

The painting and media posts Dogan shared as she covered the violence between Turkish security forces and armed Kurdish youths affiliated with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) for the shuttered all-female Jinha news agency landed the 28-year-old in jail in July 2016.

Like other towns in the southeast, where the PKK recklessly drew in the army, Nusaybin was under a round-the-clock curfew, leaving hundreds of terrified families trapped in their homes without access to food, water or medical help. Rights groups say civilians were shot dead by the security forces. Young militants' corpses were left to rot on the streets for days. Public fury lashed out not only at the state but also at the PKK. Dogan focused on the plight of the local children, sharing their fears and their pain.