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About me

I was born in London in 1990 to a Turkish family, and grew up in Istanbul until the age of 14. I have spent most of my adult life trying to understand what it actually means to be British and/or Turkish. This identity crisis, shaped almost everything I do: as a curator, a writer, and a custodian of a an intergenerational art collection that has, in its own way, been asking the same question for forty years. I am custodian of the NHK Collection, honouring my late father Nahit Kabakci's collection and focusing on art from Turkic-speaking regions, the post-Soviet world, and the Balkans. Since inheriting the collection, I have expanded it to include more women artists, a broader range of media, and now looking into gifting possibilities starting with the Lidice Art Collection in Czech republic.

I trained at the Royal College of Art, completing an MA and MPhil in Curating Contemporary Art, following an earlier degree in Advertising and Marketing at the London College of Communication. I founded Open Space Contemporary, through which I co-curated exhibitions including Tender Touches, covered by Vogue, Frieze, and Time Out. Since then I have curated independently and as a guest curator, including Hold Me Now and Mirror of Mysteries: Women Artists and the Surreal Legacy. I am currently a guest curator at the Sainsbury Centre, developing Ecstasy and the Aftermath for the "How Do We Find Love?" season opening November 2026, in collaboration with the museum's curator Vanessa Tothill.

Alongside my curatorial work, I am completing an MA in the Anthropology of Food at SOAS, where my dissertation examines Turkish coffee culture, gender, and fortune-telling. This research is grounded in the concept of samimiyet, a Turkish term for a particular register of sincerity and intimacy, and has become central to how I think about food, ritual, and hospitality as curatorial material in their own right.