Huma Kabakci is a British–Turkish independent curator, writer, and custodian of a private art collection in Turkey. Currently based in London, she is recognized for her curatorial projects that bridge cultures, disciplines, and communities through the lens of diaspora, gender, and identity politics. Her work often engages food, hospitality, and social rituals as mediums of exchange, positioning art as a space for collective inquiry and cultural translation.

Kabakci is the former founding director of Open Space Contemporary, a nomadic platform she established to support emerging and multidisciplinary practitioners. Under her direction, Open Space became known for its experimental exhibitions and residencies that reimagined the possibilities of site-specific and socially engaged practice. Her experience spans over a decade of work across galleries, museums, biennials, and auction houses in the UK, Turkey, and internationally, where she has developed projects that foreground inclusivity, dialogue, and cross-pollination between art and everyday life.

Educated in Advertising and Marketing at the London College of Communication, Kabakci went on to complete both an Master of Arts and Master of Philosophy in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, where she cultivated her research-led, collaborative approach to exhibition-making. She is currently pursuing a second MA in the Anthropology of Food at SOAS, University of London, a continuation of her long-standing interest in the social and symbolic roles of food within art and culture. This dual focus on curatorial practice and anthropological study anchors her commitment to expanding the ways in which exhibitions can embody shared experience and multisensory understanding.

Kabakci’s curatorial methodology is grounded in collaboration and intersectionality. She creates immersive environments that dissolve boundaries between disciplines, inviting artists, designers, writers, and chefs into conversation. Her projects often employ food and hospitality not as metaphors but as active materials of connection, exploring how nourishment, gathering, and taste can become political and aesthetic gestures. Through this work, she challenges traditional hierarchies within curating and proposes alternative models of care, community, and authorship.

Her current practice encompasses collection management, public programming, and curatorial consultancy, advising institutions, galleries, and private collectors on strategic development and cross-cultural engagement. Across these activities, she remains focused on how art can function as a relational tool, one that mediates social impact, nurtures belonging, and makes visible the complexities of global identity.

In 2025, she initiated Freudian Bites, an ongoing series of intimate supper-club gatherings held in her living room on the last Thursday of each month. Each dinner centers on a collaborating artist’s practice and brings together a small group of guests consisting of artists, curators, chefs, and thinkers to share a meal structured around a specific narrative or emotional theme. The project sits at the intersection of curation, ethnography, and performance, exploring how eating together among strangers becomes a form of embodied research, revealing shared mythologies, memories, and desires through the sensorial act of dining.

Drawing on Victor Turner’s notion of communitas and Michael Jackson’s concept of intersubjectivity, Kabakci frames Freudian Bites as a liminal space where distinctions between host and guest, artist and audience, dissolve into temporary kinship. The table becomes a site of psychological, social, and cultural transformation where rituals of nourishment and storytelling invite vulnerability and collective reflection. Through this project, she examines how the curator’s body and positionality as host, observer, woman, and diasporic subject inform the dynamics of care, authority, and exchange in socially engaged art.

Alongside her curatorial practice, Kabakci teaches at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, where she lectures on collection management and the global art market, and contributes writing to platforms such as STIR, Tenderfoot, FAD Magazine, and the .ART blog. She is also the author of the newsletter Curious Curator, a Substack publication exploring the intersections of art, food, and cultural exchange. Beyond her independent work, she has collaborated with and supported institutions including Gasworks, Nottingham Contemporary, and other nonprofit organizations fostering access and experimentation in the arts.

Kabakci’s work as a curator and writer reflects a belief that art is a form of shared inquiry—a space where the sensory, the intellectual, and the community converge. By foregrounding food, identity, and hospitality within her curatorial framework, she proposes a model of practice rooted in generosity, participation, and embodied knowledge. Through this lens, exhibitions become not only sites of display but acts of gathering and encounter of art as an experience of care, memory, and transformation.