No white walls surround the art at Istanbul's newest sculpture gallery. Instead, skyscrapers and tower blocks rise dramatically above its works of stone and steel, set atop the Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art in the city's Maslak business district. Meanwhile, at Borusan Contemporary, weekend visitors stroll through the empty offices of one of Turkey’s biggest holding companies – tidied up every Friday night so no paperclip is out of place – to view selections from the firm's 600-piece art collection.
This is the latest trend to hit Istanbul: the office block as art gallery. Large private companies, especially banks, have been patrons of the arts in Turkey for decades, but as the country's economy booms, the line between the art and business worlds is becoming ever harder to distinguish...
Read the rest of my article "From the water cooler to the water colour" in the October 2012 issue of Gulf Life, the in-flight magazine of Gulf Air: jpg | pdf