Biography
Haldun Kilit came to the art world through furniture. He graduated from Bilkent University's interior design department in 1996, built AHK Worldwide Interiors into one of the leading fit-out companies in Dubai — Bvlgari Hotel, Mövenpick, major hospitality projects across the Gulf — and somewhere in the process of furnishing other people's spaces developed a conviction that art should occupy them too. AWC opened in DIFC in 2021 with a specific and underserved proposition: Turkish contemporary art had almost no institutional presence in the Gulf, despite Turkey's proximity, cultural weight and increasingly strong art market. Kilit built a gallery to change that. The inaugural exhibition was Ahmet Güneştekin — not an emerging name but one of Turkey's most internationally recognised artists — which signalled from the start that AWC was not going to ease in quietly. What he has built in four years is more than a gallery programme. AWC has participated in Art D'Égypte at the Pyramids of Giza, shown at Contemporary Istanbul, opened a second space in Istanbul in 2024, and maintains an artist residency alongside its exhibition calendar. The ambition by 2030 is galleries in the UK, USA, CIS and MENA. Whether or not those timelines hold, the underlying contribution is already real: AWC has created a consistent platform for Turkish artists in a market that had no dedicated space for them, and done it from inside one of the world's most competitive gallery districts. That is not a small thing.