Vasif Kortun (born November 6, 1958) is a curator, writer and educator in the field of contemporary art, its institutions, and exhibition practices. Kortun served as the founding director of several international institutions, including SALT, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Proje4L, and the Museum of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. In 2006, he received the Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies for his "experimental approach and openness to new ideas to challenge the contemporary art world and push its parameters beyond national or international, local or global developments." Kortun has written extensively on contemporary art and visual culture in Turkey for publications and periodicals internationally. He currently lives in Ayvalık, a seaside town on the northwestern Aegean coast of Turkey.

Kortun served as the Director of Research and Programs (2011–17) at SALT, a non-profit research institution located in Istanbul and Ankara. Under his direction, SALT has organized numerous exhibitions and public programs around visual and material culture, amassed a library of over 40,000 publications, and built an archive on art, architecture and social history of Turkey with over 1,500,000 digitized items available online. Writing about the inauguration of SALT in 2011, writer Kaelen Wilson-Goldie describes Kortun as "an unabashed power broker on the Istanbul scene." In her text, Wilson-Goldie defines SALT as "a think tank in action, a collaborative space for testing out new forms of debate and exchange."

Kortun resigned from his position at SALT in April 2017 and organized a public talk where he presented his paper "Questions on Institutions" (Kurum Soruları). He presented the English version of this talk in October 2017 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, as part of The Museum Is Not What It Used To Be series. In this talk, he says he was part of a team that conceived public programs for people who "are more intelligent than us, because we do not believe people are simple-minded." "When we begin a project, we exercise what we call 'state of unknowing'. . . the idea is to enter an agonistic sphere where difficult questions can be posed without being considered incriminating or hostile."

Following his resignation, he remains on SALT's board of directors.

Before instituting SALT, Kortun served as the Founding Director of Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul (2001–10), a non-profit art organization that hosted exhibitions, conferences, an international residency program, and an archive of contemporary art in Turkey; Proje4L Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art (2001–04), the first private contemporary art museum in Turkey; and the Museum of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annadale-on-Hudson (1993–97), the exhibition space that preceded the Hessel Museum of Art that currently hosts over 1,700 contemporary artworks.

Kortun describes the late-1980s exhibition/happening series Serotonin as a turning point for his practice. Conceived by Arhan Kayar et al., Serotonin I was organized at Feshane in 1989, and Serotonin II at Gashouse (Gazhane) in Istanbul in 1992. Kortun participated in the second edition of the series as an organizer and "for some as an artist." Kortun speaks about Feshane as an eye opener as it was a major site for Turkey's process of modernization: It was built as one of the most advanced textile factories in the late 19th century, to be abandoned in 1986 for environmental improvements. The exhibition and the related programs used the abandoned building as part of the exhibition.

Later, Kortun organized Memory/Recollection, a series that is considered to be the first contemporary art exhibition organized by an independent curator in Turkey. Memory/Recollection was organized in 1991 at Taksim Art Gallery (Taksim Sanat Galerisi), and Number Fifty/Memory/Recollection II (Elli Numara: Anı/Bellek II) was presented in 1993 in Akaretler, Istanbul, where "politics displaced art" as the participating artists and he decided to prematurely close the exhibition after the banner of the show was replaced with a Democrat Party poster.

He has undertaken numerous independent curatorial projects including most recently an exhibition of works by Cengiz Çekil (2010) at RAMPA, Istanbul—the first comprehensive presentation of Çekil's practice. He co-curated The Columns Held us Up (2009) with November Paynter at Artists Space, New York, where the exhibition was "framed much like a one-month artist residency" as Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center had paused its programs to be incorporated into SALT.