Vuslat Doğan Sabancı: Media CEO to Artist

Vuslat Doğan Sabancı, who once led Turkey’s largest newspaper, has quietly built a body of work that now occupies prominent spaces on the global art stage.

From CEO to Studio

During her tenure at Hürriyet, Vuslat balanced a demanding corporate schedule with late-night creative sessions. She would often stay in her Istanbul studio until six in the morning, producing drawings, sculptures, and experimental pieces. For almost twenty years, none of these works were shown publicly. Her first exhibition did not open until 2022, and it was only after that year that her art began to appear in galleries and biennials.

Silent Practice

The artist frequently speaks of the need for listening, listening to people, to materials, and to herself. She describes a Turkish concept called emanet, meaning something entrusted but not owned, as a guiding principle. In her practice, silence becomes a space where judgment and criticism can surface, but patience allows clarity to emerge. Her materials range from marble and bronze to clay, felt, and even electroplated plants. For the 2025 piece Tower of Babel, she incorporated trees burned in the Los Angeles wildfires, while in May We Meet in the Silence of Our Souls she used simple earth, water, and air.

Emerging on the Biennial Circuit

Since her debut, Vuslat’s schedule has expanded rapidly. In the summer of 2024, she presented a room-sized installation, House of Silence, at the Conductor art fair in New York. The same year, dozens of her clay sculptures were installed in a medieval former Greek Orthodox church on the island of Rhodes. Her participation in the second Biennale of Contemporary Keramics in Rhodes is documented in the stats of the event. The installation, titled May We Meet in the Silence of Our Souls, begins at the threshold of Our Lady of the Castle, a former Greek Orthodox church that later served as an Ottoman mosque. Small organic clay forms guide visitors inside, described by Vuslat as resembling “the formless shape of breath.”

The Concept of Emanet

Vuslat’s work is deeply rooted in the idea of stewardship. She sees emanet as a responsibility to care for what is entrusted to us before passing it on. This philosophy informs her choice of materials and her approach to space. The installation at Rhodes is part of the fixtures of the Biennale, and she joined the squad of participating artists to explore how silence can shape perception.

Her rapid ascent has drawn attention from critics. Andrew Graham-Dixon noted that Vuslat’s debut felt like “a novice and an old hand rolled into one.” This observation underscores the paradox of an artist who had been creating privately for nearly two decades before stepping onto the public stage. The trajectory of her career, studio work first, public exhibition later, offers a unique narrative within the contemporary art world.