How can we open spaces that are more attentive and compassionate?

We spoke with Huma Kabakcı about her practice, which centers on multidisciplinary production and collaboration, and favors fluidity in response to the art world’s demand for institutional clarity

Interview: Merve Akar Akgün

Huma Kabakcı. Fotoğraf: Emma Witter

Huma, 2025 seems to have been a year of shedding skins and nourishment for you. One of the most significant steps you took was donating the NHK Collection, formed by your family, to the Lidice Art Collection and securing a permanent home for it. Moving away from ownership and toward stewardship, allowing a collection to enter public memory rather than remain private. How does this decision signal a sense of relief or transformation in the way you carry forward your family’s legacy?

Like many people, 2025 was a year of transformation for me. The decision to donate the NHK Collection to the Lidice Art Collection represents a conscious shift from ownership toward stewardship. Allowing the collection to enter public memory, rather than carrying only a story belonging to my family, created a profound sense of relief for me. Positioning myself not as someone who possesses this legacy inherited from my father, but as a steward who ensures its continued circulation, generated a feeling of ethical responsibility rather than burden. The collection’s ability to breathe within a public context has, in turn, allowed me to move more freely and fluidly within my curatorial practice.

Some of the artworks donated from the NHK Collection to the Lidice Art Collection. From left to right:

Edin Numankadic, Sarajevo Box, 1992-1996, Mixed materials in a wooden box, 25 x 40.5 x 30 cm

Volkan Aslan, My Revered Elders, Collage, 20 x 30 cm

Ferruh Başağa, Cross, Oil on canvas, 115 x 90 cm

Living in London and coming from a family with a long-standing collecting tradition, you have been closely embedded in the art world from an early age. Yet when we look at your practice, we see a move away from conventional collecting toward more humane and restorative fields such as sound healing, food culture, and psychoanalysis. How do you balance the legacy you inherited with your own personal and deliberately modest trajectory?

That is very kind of you. Growing up close to the center of the art world has consistently pushed me to look beyond the center itself. The legacy passed down through my family offered a form of infrastructure rather than visibility, and I chose to expand this foundation through more humane and relational fields. Practices such as food anthropology, sound, and psychoanalysis remind me that art is not only about representation, but also about touch, encounter, and care. In navigating this legacy, rather than rejecting or romanticizing it, I have chosen a path that opens it to the public by placing works within museum collections and public institutions internationally, most notably the Lidice Art Museum. While remaining attentive and ethically grounded, I am interested in cultivating relationships that are less performative and more sustained, slower, and deeper.

Views from Freudian Bites meetings. Photo: Seçkin Uysal

With Freudian Bites, you bring food, art, and psychoanalysis together around the same table. You move art away from being a distant object viewed on a wall and turn it into an experience that is eaten, shared, and spoken through. In these gatherings, what has surprised or nourished you most about the ways people relate to art and to one another?

What has surprised me most at the Freudian Bites tables is how quickly people lower their defenses. When a plate is shared, especially when that plate is connected to an artist, a process, or a narrative, conversation gradually gives way to listening. The relationship to art also shifts; instead of critical distance, an intuitive form of closeness begins to emerge. The most nourishing moments are when participants articulate that this is the first time they have experienced art in such a bodily and emotional way. At these tables, art is no longer an outcome but becomes a collectively woven process.

In your newsletter, you write about the trainings you undertook at Sound Universe London and your journey into sound healing. We often speak about the healing potential of art, but in your case this takes the form of a concrete practice, working with frequencies and crystal bowls. How do you bring this spiritual field into dialogue with your curatorial perspective? Has sound become a new curatorial terrain for you?

My initial engagement with sound therapy began in 2018, when I first encountered it as a student. Over the years, as I experienced its effects more deeply, I gradually stepped further into the practice myself. Working with sound is holistic for me, yet it also feels like a natural extension of my curatorial practice. I work with space, time, and the body, and sound is a medium that can touch all three simultaneously. Engaging with crystal bowls and frequencies opens up not a mystical escape, but a tangible and embodied field of experience. This is where the curatorial perspective becomes crucial: the question of which sound is presented, in which context, and with what intention.

Mirror of Mysteries: Women Artists and the Surreal Legacy, Artists: Ingrid Berthon-Moine, Leonora Carrington, Anna Perach, Chantal Powell, Emma Witter, Curator: Huma Kabakcı, La Boulangerie!, Paris, 2024

In the text you wrote for Laura White’s project, you focused on domestic spaces and intimacy through the ritual of coffee fortune reading. In February 2026, you will also be leading a similar workshop with Seçil Erel. Bringing this ritual, one that circulates largely among women and is rooted in Turkish culture, into London’s contemporary art scene, what does this evoke for you in terms of cultural memory and women’s narratives?

After writing the text for Laura White’s project, and as I continued to research Turkish coffee consumption, gender relations, and ritual practices through anthropological theory, I decided to dedicate my master’s thesis to this subject. For me, the ritual of coffee fortune reading is both deeply personal and inherently political. It is a narrative form that unfolds within domestic space and among women, while also carrying a memory that exists outside official histories and public narratives. Bringing this ritual into the context of London’s contemporary art scene, particularly in dialogue with Seçil Erel’s artistic practice and process, feels like making a kind of cultural whisper audible. In this setting, fortune reading shifts from an act of divination to a shared state of being together, looking, and listening. I am very much looking forward to our collaboration on February 27. 

In March 2026, you will be curating a group exhibition in London titled Becoming Through Pain. The title is striking. Considering that you have described 2025 as a year of purification, what emotional need, personal or global, did this exhibition emerge from?

The exhibition Becoming Through Pain, which I am curating for Sensity Studio, where I also serve on the board, emerged from both a personal and a collective need. Over the past year, I observed that pain holds a transformative potential that reveals itself not when it is suppressed, but when it is shared. With this exhibition, I wanted to bring together artists who approach pain not as a static condition, but as a dynamic force that shapes, displaces, and transforms the female body. Becoming Through Pain foregrounds the fact that women’s pain has historically been understood not only as a physiological experience, but one that has often been suppressed, pathologized, or rendered invisible within medical, social, and intimate domains. Opening on March 24 at Somers Gallery, the exhibition will feature works by Pauline Batista, Sena Başöz, Dyana Gravina, Jennifer Nieuwland, Lolita Pelegrime, and Aziza Shadenova.

Processing the past and digesting the future, Artists: Saelia Aparicio, Anna Perach, Rafal Zajko, Amba Sayal-Bennett, Yulia Iosilzon, Curator: Huma Kabakcı, Badr El Jundi, Madrid, 2023

When you describe yourself, you avoid fixed labels and instead speak of a fluid practice. Curator, collector, writer, healer. How does this multiplicity create a sense of freedom, or breathing space, within an art world that can often feel overly institutional?

Compared to my twenties, defining myself through a single label now gives me a greater sense of mobility. What matters most to me is collaboration and a multidisciplinary mode of working. In response to the art world’s demand for institutional clarity, I choose to operate through a fluid practice. Curating, writing, bringing people together around food or shared tables, or working with sound. All of these activities orbit the same question: how can we open spaces that are more attentive and compassionate? This multiplicity protects me from speed and from the pressure of constant production. Rather than belonging to a fixed position, I value being inside a process.

At a time when relationships in the art world can often unfold in highly strategic ways, where does sincerity sit within your understanding of success? Looking toward 2026 and beyond, alongside your family’s legacy, with which emotions would you like the name Huma Kabakçı to be most closely associated?

Sincerity and authenticity are among my primary measures of success. Strategy can, of course, be necessary at times; but when strategy overtakes sincerity, what remains is often an empty form of visibility that can feel artificial. I tend to assess success through the sustainability and depth of the relationships that are formed. From 2026 onward, I would like my name to be associated, both alongside my family’s legacy and independently of it, with a sense of compassion, openness, and trust.