The gallery and the Turkish art market: Istanbul as an emerging hub

01An ecosystem built over two decades

The contemporary Turkish art market has structured itself around a handful of founding institutions and galleries. Istanbul Modern, inaugurated in 2004 in a former port warehouse and relocated to a building designed by Renzo Piano in 2023, is Turkey's first museum of modern and contemporary art. Its permanent collection and temporary exhibitions have helped legitimise the Turkish scene in the eyes of the international community. The Koc collection, behind the museum, is one of the most important private collections of Turkish and international contemporary art.

SALT, an institution founded by Garanti Bank in 2011, occupies two spaces in Istanbul, including the former headquarters of the Ottoman Bank in Karakoy. Its programme blends contemporary art, architecture, design and historical research, and its archives constitute a valuable resource for scholars. Arter, the exhibition space of the Vehbi Koc Foundation, opened a new building designed by Grimshaw Architects in Dolapdere in 2019, with six floors of exhibition space. Pera Museum, founded by the Suna and Inan Kirac Foundation, completes this institutional fabric with programming ranging from Ottoman art to contemporary art and major international exhibitions.

Among private galleries, the Beyoglu district and the Karakoy area concentrate the most active spaces. Galeri Nev, founded in 1984, is one of the oldest contemporary art galleries in Turkey and played a founding role in professionalising the market. Galerist, founded by Murat Pilevneli in 2001, represented artists such as Haluk Akakce and Ahmet Ogut before Pilevneli opened his own eponymous space in 2019, which has become one of the city's most ambitious galleries, hosting exhibitions of leading international artists. Dirimart, founded in 2002, represents Turkish and international artists and participates regularly in Art Basel and Frieze. Zilberman Gallery, present in Istanbul and Berlin, illustrates the dual-location strategy that characterises several Turkish galleries. Rampa Gallery, founded in 2006, has distinguished itself with programming that blends emerging Turkish artists and established international ones, building bridges between the two scenes.

02Contemporary Istanbul and the fair network

Contemporary Istanbul, founded in 2006, is the city's principal art fair. It gathers Turkish and international galleries each year and constitutes the highlight of the local art calendar. The fair has experienced periods of growth and contraction reflecting the country's economic and political fluctuations, but it remains an essential meeting point for regional market participants. Its thematic sections and talks programmes provide a framework for reflection on market trends and emerging practices.

Artistanbul, a more recently created fair, targets the segment of emerging galleries and accessible price points. It complements Contemporary Istanbul's offering by addressing young collectors and first-time buyers in the art market. The Artcontact salon and the satellite events developing around the major fairs contribute to densifying Istanbul's art calendar and creating an art week comparable to those observed in Basel, London or Paris.

The participation of Turkish galleries in international fairs has intensified. Dirimart has exhibited at Art Basel, Pilevneli at Frieze London, Zilberman at Art Cologne. These presences attest to the maturity of the Turkish market and the ability of its galleries to compete with European and American players on the most demanding platforms. They also help attract the attention of international collectors to the Turkish scene, creating a beneficial ripple effect for the entire ecosystem.

03Turkish artists on the international stage

Several Turkish artists have achieved major international recognition. Hale Tenger, whose installations have been shown at numerous international biennials, explores questions of collective memory and political violence with a formal power that transcends the local context. Kutlug Ataman, a video artist whose works have entered the collections of MoMA and Tate, interrogates marginal identities and narratives of Turkish modernity through filmed portraits of unusual duration and intensity.

Cevdet Erek, who represented Turkey at the Venice Biennale in 2017, works on the relationships between sound, space and time. Ayse Erkmen, a sculptor and installation artist whose works inhabit public space, has been exhibited at Skulptur Projekte Munster and at leading museums across Europe. Sarkis, a French-Turkish artist whose career spans more than fifty years, was the subject of a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou and remains a tutelary figure whose influence can be traced in many younger artists.

The younger generation, with artists such as Ali Kazma, whose videos on human labour were shown at the Turkish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, Nilbar Gures, whose performances and photographs interrogate gender norms in Turkish society, and Burcak Bingol, whose ceramic installations dialogue with Anatolian artisanal tradition, brings fresh perspectives on questions of gender, migration and cultural heritage. This diversity of practices — video, installation, sculpture, performance, ceramics — offers European galleries a rich and original range of artistic propositions.

04Turkish collectors and their influence

Turkish collecting developed around several industrial families who played a founding role. The Koc and Sabanci families, heading two of Turkey's largest conglomerates, created foundations and museums that structure the country's cultural life. The Sakip Sabanci Museum, housed in a villa on the Bosphorus, hosts high-level international exhibitions. The Eczacibasi family, through the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, is behind the Istanbul Biennial and ongoing support for the visual arts.

Beyond these great fortunes, a generation of younger collectors has emerged, driven by the economic dynamism of the 2000s. These collectors buy on the local scene as well as at international fairs, and their growing presence at Art Basel, Frieze and FIAC has contributed to the visibility of Turkish art on the global stage. Some have opened private spaces accessible to the public, such as the Elgiz Museum in Istanbul, contributing to the vibrancy of the city's cultural scene. Diaspora collectors, based in Germany, the United Kingdom or the United States, constitute an additional segment that the European dealer can reach more easily.

The European dealer wishing to work with Turkish collectors must understand that the personal relationship takes precedence over the commercial transaction. Trust is built over time, through repeated visits, invitations and sincere engagement with the artists represented. Hospitality is a central value in Turkish culture, and the dealer who accepts invitations, shares a meal and takes time to know the collector as a person lays the foundations of a lasting commercial relationship.

05Specific challenges of the Turkish market

The Turkish market presents challenges that the European dealer must take into account. The volatility of the Turkish lira, which has lost a significant portion of its value in recent years, affects the purchasing power of local collectors and complicates the pricing of works. Turkish galleries that sell in foreign currencies protect their artists from this monetary erosion, but this excludes part of the local clientele who lack income in dollars or euros.

The Turkish political context introduces an additional layer of complexity. Restrictions on freedom of expression, diplomatic tensions with certain European countries and episodes of censorship affecting the cultural world can affect gallery programming and the circulation of works. Turkish artists whose work addresses politically sensitive subjects must navigate carefully between artistic expression and institutional constraints. The European dealer must be aware of these realities and approach the Turkish scene with a nuanced understanding of the context, avoiding moralising postures that would be poorly received by local professionals.

Customs and logistics questions also deserve attention. The import and export of artworks in Turkey are subject to specific regulations, and administrative delays can be lengthy. As Turkey is not a member of the European Union, customs formalities are more demanding than for intra-European exchanges. The European dealer considering exhibiting Turkish artists or participating in fairs in Istanbul must anticipate these constraints and engage experienced local service providers, particularly for transport and insurance of works.

06Strategies for the European dealer

The European dealer wishing to engage with the Turkish scene has several approaches available. The first consists of identifying Turkish artists whose work dialogues with the existing programme and initiating a collaboration, potentially through co-representation with a local gallery. This model, practised by several European galleries, allows the dealer to benefit from the partner gallery's local network while providing the artist with international visibility. Co-representation is particularly suited to the Turkish scene, where trust relationships between artists and galleries are strong and where an artist who leaves a local gallery for a foreign one risks losing their foothold in the domestic market.

The second approach consists of participating in Contemporary Istanbul to test the local market and establish contacts with Turkish collectors and institutions. The fair offers immediate visibility in a context where the European dealer benefits from prestige capital linked to a Western positioning. The cost of participation is lower than that of major European fairs, allowing the dealer to test market receptivity without disproportionate financial commitment.

The third approach, more ambitious, consists of opening a satellite space in Istanbul, as Zilberman has done in reverse (from Istanbul to Berlin) or as Galerie Perrotin has done in other emerging cities. This strategy requires considerable investment but offers direct access to the Turkish market and, by extension, to the markets of the Middle East and Central Asia.

07Istanbul in the reshaping of the global market

Istanbul's rise is part of a broader reshaping of the global art market. Traditional centres — New York, London, Paris — retain their pre-eminence, but new poles are emerging and redistributing flows of collectors and artists. Seoul, with the Frieze Seoul fair launched in 2022, illustrates this trend in East Asia. Istanbul occupies a comparable position for the region extending from Southeastern Europe to the Middle East, with the geographic advantage of being accessible within a few hours' flight from Paris, London, Dubai or Tel Aviv.

For Artedusa partner galleries, the Turkish scene represents a source of artists and collectors that the platform enables them to reach beyond geographical barriers. Presenting Turkish artists or works acquired on the Istanbul scene offers galleries an international dimension that enriches their programme and attracts a clientele eager to discover the scenes shaping the market of tomorrow.