Transformation nourished by solidarity, openness and continuity

In September, Defne Ayas stepped into her new role as Director of the Van Abbemuseum. We spoke with her about this transition, and about her broader views on museums and curatorship

Interview: Funda Küçükyılmaz

Defne Ayas. Photo: Boudewijn Bollmann

Located in Eindhoven, in the south of the Netherlands, the Van Abbemuseum is among the most internationally recognised contemporary art museums. Over the past 20 years, its outgoing director Charles Esche, who left his role at the end of 2024, shaped the institution through its strong stance on social and political issues and its meaningful relationships with artists from different geographies. Now, the museum’s new director, Defne Ayas, is looking not only to preserve this legacy but to deepen it. At a time when fascism is on the rise globally, she is exploring how to fully open the museum’s walls by drawing strength from the locals.

As someone who has lived in Eindhoven for nearly two years and worked in arts and culture for more than two decades, the Van Abbemuseum has always been more than just a museum to me. It is a space that feels familiar through its worldview, somewhere I feel peaceful. When I learned that Ayas, whose curatorial perspective I deeply respect and whose projects I have followed with interest, would become the museum’s next director, it warmed my heart. Stepping into this role during such politically, economically, and socially challenging times, Ayas also reminds us of the “glass cliff” that women leaders often face, and her awareness of this responsibility is something that excites me.

At a time when so much of what we hold onto feels turned upside down, we talked with Ayas about her approach to museum-making, one that questions established norms, centres the wellbeing of everyone working in the museum including volunteers, and aims to build bridges between the local and the global starting from the museum’s own street. 

You’re stepping into a museum long led by Charles Esche, who positioned it as a space of political and social resistance. You also come from a curatorial tradition rooted in social and political engagement. What does it mean for you to take on this role at this particular moment, both globally and locally, in Eindhoven? Where do you see continuity, and where do you foresee differences in your approach to the Van Abbemuseum?

Stepping into this leadership at a moment of mounting municipal bureaucracy and mounting pressure across the cultural field inevitably summons the specter of the glass cliff. Women are so often invited in when the terrain is already fractured and handed both the privilege and the precarity of crisis. I know this dynamic well. Still, tending to what has been overlooked, repairing weakened structures, and reimagining the institution with a long horizon is part of the call. On this ground, the work ahead must be rooted in openness and continuity, yet oriented toward transformation. I am mobilizing all my energies, alongside the entire staff and the city itself, to prepare the museum for the decade to come: a museum bulletproof enough to weather the pressures of our time and transparent and open enough to breathe with its public.

And yes, the Van Abbemuseum has long stood as a site of social engagement, political and cultural critique, accessibility, and experiment. Carrying this lineage forward is both an honor and a responsibility. Ours remains, at its core, a 20th-century institution, formed in the churn of pre-war and post-war anxieties, built on the bricks and contradictions of Europe’s colonial entanglements. Its foundations still reverberate with those histories. And while the museum sometimes moves in ways that feel out of step with the second quarter of the 21st century, the world itself is similarly unmoored. 

Across Europe, we are witnessing the acceleration of what I can only describe as quantum fascism: a metastasizing far right that folds time, memory, and fear into political matter. In this landscape, I return to a central question: can museology hold the narratives of coloniality, continue unpacking modernity and its broken “never again” promises, and still widen its thresholds to welcome publics long kept at the margins of museums? Modern art was once cast as a sign of progress, an antidote. Today, we must interrogate what “progress” might mean.

Bridging Minds, Exhibition view, Van Abbemuseum, Photo: Boudewijn Bollmann

The Van Abbemuseum has often positioned itself as a “museum in opposition”. It has been a place that brings different geographies and communities together, making the audience think, communicate. How do you understand this museum’s potential, in today’s political and economic environment, to function as both a civic artistic platform and an international, inclusive space that goes beyond the art?

With nearly one hundred volunteers and a staff shaped by long-term dedication, the museum operates like a beehive. distributed, interdependent, collectively intelligent. There is a regional culture of imece, a tradition of shared labor and mutual responsibility. Whether it stems from Catholic communal ethos or poor soil dynamics, the ingenuity born of producing on difficult ground, or the resilience forged after wartime destruction, it remains a rare and essential resource.

My aim is to deepen these internal relationships and extend the museum’s ties and knowledge. The museum must breathe with its environment and, in doing so, help shape a transformation already underway.

In a landscape of growing drift toward provincialism, the museum must stand as a generator for artistic and design experimentation, an anchor for inclusive practice, and a committed site where civic engagement can expand rather than contract. This is not a retreat into provincialism, indeed, that is the very danger the institution has been facing before my arrival. Rather, the work ahead is infrastructural. It calls for new forms of collaboration, new rhythms of exchange, and new ways of holding complexity together.

The museum has opened its doors to postcolonial perspectives, yes.  And the next horizon requires deeper rooting: not only participating in global conversations, but staying in continuous, reciprocal relation with its own civic imagination. If a museum cannot maintain a living connection with the people of its own street and region, how can it speak with any integrity to faraway contexts? Institutions are often tempted to broadcast outward while remaining strangely mute at home. I am mindful of the bridging and the listening this moment demands.

Ayoung Kim, Body^n, 2025. Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk. Image courtesy of Performa and the artist.

You’ve worked with global arts organizations including Kunstinstituut Melly (fka Witte de With) in Rotterdam, as well as landmark biennials including the 13th Gwangju Biennale, the 6th Moscow Biennale, and the 11th Baltic Triennale, the Pavilion of Turkey at the 56th Venice Biennale, and you will continue in your role as Curator-at-Large at Performa, New York’s biennial dedicated to visual art performance.

Considering these global experiences, and as someone who spent time in cities like Istanbul, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, New York, and Shanghai, which are all very layered, fast-paced, culturally established urban environments, now working in Eindhoven, a mid-size city with a strong industrial past, and now positions itself in the design and technology ecosystem, and with a different rhythm, maybe more introverted, how do you relate to the cultural fabric of this place? How might your own transnational approach shape your direction of the museum in terms of its relation to its urban and social context?

Eindhoven’s industrial, design, and technology heritage is an extraordinary asset. Being in a city positioned along the fault lines of global chip wars makes thinking about the future unavoidable; the urgency becomes almost bodily. My background moving between geographies, histories, and cultural sensibilities has sharpened my ability to honor context, and to question dominant narratives but also to see talent from multiple vantage points. This experience directly shapes how I understand the Van Abbemuseum’s relationship with the city. Eindhoven is expanding, enriched by growing international, mainly Indian, Korean, Turkish, and many other communities as part of its 2040 ambitions. What matters to me is ensuring these bright future-thinkers can see themselves reflected in the museum, that it becomes a space where resonance is possible.

Coming to Eindhoven after living in major cities like Istanbul, New York, Shanghai, and working across cultural climates such as Moscow and Korea has been a markedly different experience in scale and pace. A smaller city brings fewer distractions and, I believe, greater possibility for depth. Let’s see where it leads; it is certainly a risk for someone as global and nomadic as I am. Working in a smaller city, especially within a museum institution, inevitably involves more bureaucracy and a slower rhythm. I will be mentoring the younger team, coaching, motivating, and encouraging them; they are stellar. And yet, despite the slower tempo, there is an energy here that makes the question “Can we still change the world?” feel tangible.  

Whether a dream or hallucination of mine, the capacity to recreate reality at a high frequency is still present in the house and in the city.

Left: Göksu Kunak, Bygone Innocence, Photo: David Visnjic

Right: Jack O’Brien, Cascade, 2024, Berlin, Photo: GRAYSC, Image courtesy of the artist and Capitain Petzel

Currently a design exhibition titled Bridging Minds is on display to mark the 25th edition of Dutch Design Week (DDW). Curated by a guest curator Miriam van der Lubbe, creative head of the DDW, the exhibition will continue until 18 January 2026. We also see that a movement, sound and performance exhibition will be opening on 31 January 2026, as part of the final edition of its series titled Positions. Can you give us information on these exhibitions, also share some details about the exhibitions you’re planning?

Over the past two years, during a period of transitioning leadership, the museum’s trajectory has quietly shifted from decolonial discussions to this exhibition inaugurated by the Queen. Bridging Minds fosters interdisciplinary thinking and engagement with social contexts, generating both popular appeal and intergenerational impact. For the museum, this approach opens new horizons of audiences. Curated by Miriam van der Lubbe, strategic designer and creative director of Dutch Design Week, the exhibition presents works from our collections alongside design loans from across the country. I find the social design studios and circular economy initiatives especially compelling, though my own passion lies with works engaging in algorithmic critique, a focus I hope to explore further in future exhibitions.

Positions, curated by Zippora Elders, brings together artists working with performance, including several I have collaborated with previously, such as Göksu Kunak and Ayumi Paul. This exhibition resonates deeply with my twenty-year curatorial practice, which has long taken performance seriously, shaped by years of work with PERFORMA in New York. Currently, this practice encompasses several productions set to premiere in New York this November, including works by Ayoung Kim, Lina Lapalyte, and Moriah Evans. Future exhibitions will continue to explore this live thread.

The Van Abbemuseum is known for its diverse international art collection and its collaboration with artists from different parts of the world. How do you see your curatorial approach contributing to or expanding this diversity?

The Van Abbemuseum’s already extensive and diverse international collection provides a strong foundation. It brings together artists such as Leyla Gediz, Gülsün Karamustafa, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Rei Kawakubo, El Lissitzky, the Kabakovs, Dan Perjovski, Picasso, Andrea Zittel, Martha Rosler, and Qiu Zhijie. For me, the first “treasure-gift” came from Sarkis. To carry the collection forward, certain areas require deepening. In particular, gaps in gender representation across the century should be addressed, and greater space should be given to artists working with engines and data forms. These two axes, gender balance and the artistic languages of the algorithmic age will be central to the museum’s renewal and its ongoing engagement with contemporary audiences.

Sojung Jun. I Do Nine-Tailed Fox, 2025. Photo: Masao Katagami. Image courtesy of Asia Society

What’s the biggest challenge you think you’re ready to face in this new role, and what are you most looking forward to? 

One of the greatest challenges will be sustaining high-quality work in a period when institutions face both internal and external pressures, finding ways to hold space for abundance mentality and complexity in an age of asymmetry, where both left and right can challenge the cultural and artistic field, as recently witnessed at MUHKA in Belgium. Our team is resilient and open to growth, and my immediate focus is on healing the museum’s internal dynamics. Equally important is balancing local relevance with international impact, and framing accessibility as a forward-looking vector for art. Working in a city alive with sensors and chip-printing technologies, building meaningful connections with communities, experimenting with new formats, and reimagining how a museum can operate today are all profound sources of motivation for me.

You’ve been part of the Turkish arts scene from both within and afar. Given your international curatorial path and now your position at the Van Abbemuseum, how do you reflect on the current state of contemporary art in Turkey?

Perhaps I am not the best person to comment, given my recent experience, because what interests me most is what happened afterward, how my dismissal set off a chain reaction in the scene, leading toward more collective gatherings, something I had envisioned in my now-defiled proposal. I cannot speak fully, as I was not present at the meetings and gatherings, though I wish I had been. Still, I know many deeply committed individuals working across both museology and the gallery scene. Many artists and collectives across Turkey continue to produce courageous work despite challenging conditions, indeed, I often say, bad times, great art. Alternative spaces, independent platforms, and grassroots initiatives remain vibrant and dynamic.

Raimundas Malašauskas, Send in the Clowns, 2025. Photo by Maria Baranova. Image courtesy of Performa and the artist.

What keeps you connected to the Turkish arts scene intellectually, emotionally, or politically? And do you see your new position as a potential bridge for collaborations from that scene?

Over the years, the museum has both collected and contributed to the visibility of artists such as Ahmet Öğüt, Nilbar Güreş, and Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin, and holds works by Leyla Gediz and Gülsün Karamustafa. It has also been an early home for curators like Esra Sarıgedik and a partner in long-term, cross-museum platforms with SALT. Naturally, much has evolved over the past twenty years…My personal ties to Turkey remain strong, as do the friendships I have with artists. We continue to nourish one another; political and geopolitical insights, alongside intellectual and emotional closeness, continue to shape my commitment, thinking and perspectives.