Vuslat Transitions From Media CEO To Acclaimed Artist In Four Years

(MENAFN- USA Art News) After nearly two decades spent making art in private, Vuslat Doğan Sabancı, known professionally as Vuslat, has rapidly emerged as a prominent artist on the international biennial circuit. She first exhibited her work in 2022, and by 2026, her art calendar is notably busier, featuring installations in New York and Rhodes, and her first monograph.

Previously, Vuslat held a dual life, serving as chief executive of Hürriyet, Turkey's largest newspaper, by day. Her nights were dedicated to art making in her studio, sometimes working until 6 AM, she told ARTnews in an interview from Istanbul. For almost 20 years, she drew, sculpted, worked in clay, and experimented with materials without ever exhibiting her creations.

This summer, her work has been featured in multiple venues. In New York, she presented the room-sized installation“House of Silence” at the Conductor art fair. In Rhodes, dozens of her clay sculptures are installed in a former Greek Orthodox church, as part of the second Biennale of Contemporary Keramics. Her monograph,“May We Meet in the Silence of Our Souls,” was co-published by DISTANZ and the University of Chicago Press.

Vuslat's work often explores the tension between public and private life, as well as the concept of silence. She repeatedly emphasizes the importance of listening, a contrast to her prior career in media, where she advocated for freedom of expression, gender equality, and human rights at Hürriyet. She noted that as politics became more polarized and media focused on metrics, listening seemed to diminish. Art, for her, offered a different path.

She developed the concept of emanet, a Turkish word describing something entrusted to one's care but not truly owned, such as an object, memory, story, children, or nature. The responsibility, she explained, involves not just preservation but careful stewardship before passing it on.

Her materials include marble, bronze, clay, felt, and electroplated plants. For her work“Tower of Babel” ( 2025 ), she incorporated trees burned in the Los Angeles wildfires. In Rhodes, her installation“May We Meet in the Silence of Our Souls” at Our Lady of the Castle, a former Greek Orthodox church that later became an Ottoman mosque, features small organic clay forms resembling“the formless shape of breath” leading visitors into the building.

Vuslat's rapid ascent in the art world is notable, given her background as a member of one of Turkey's prominent families and her distinguished career in business and philanthropy. She began exhibiting in 2022 at Pi Artworks in London, after nearly two decades of private practice, followed by shows at the Baksı Museum, Istanbul's Tophane-i Amire, and the Museum of Troy. Critic Andrew Graham-Dixon, writing in her monograph, observed that Vuslat seemed like“a novice and an old hand rolled into one.”

Source: ARTnews

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