İsmet Doğan was born in Adıyaman in 1957. He graduated from Marmara University, Faculty of Fine Arts in 1983. In 1987, he spent two years in Paris with a scholarship from the French Government. In the early stages of his career, he was influenced by Dadaism, producing collages, graffiti, and assemblages.
Doğan’s practice engages in a critical inquiry into culture, tradition, and history. He reflects on the violence and trauma embedded in Turkey’s Westernization and modernization processes, incorporating Latin letters into his work to highlight the language reform as a tool of social engineering. Since the 1990s, he has focused on installation art, intervening in visual norms to create new meanings. In the 2000s, he integrated critiques of colonialism into his art, using film strips and mirrors as key materials—confronting viewers with both his own image and the alienation of the body.
