Defne Ayas
Defne Ayas is a curator, lecturer, educator, and editor in the field of contemporary art and its institutions. She grew up in Istanbul and Germany, and is now based in Berlin. Since September 2025 she is director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.
Ayas directed, cofounded, curated, and advised several art institutes, initiatives, and exhibition platforms across the globe, including in the United States, Netherlands, China and Hong Kong, South Korea, Russia, Lithuania, and Italy. Exploring art's role within social and political processes, Ayas is best known for conceiving inventive exhibition and biennale formats within diverse geographies, in each instance composing interdisciplinary frameworks that provide historical anchoring and engagement with local conditions. Working between Berlin and New York since 2018, she currently serves as Senior Program Advisor and Curator at Large at Performa. Until June 2021, Ayas was the artistic director of the 2021 Gwangju Biennale, together with Natasha Ginwala.
Defne Ayas was the director of the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. Towards the end of her tenure in 2017, she announced that the institution had to change its name to dissociate itself from its namesake, the Dutch naval officer Witte Corneliszoon de With. The institution's decision to change its name was immediately politicized, causing controversy in the Netherlands. The decision for a name change was triggered by an Open Letter to Witte de With published on 14 June 2017 by Egbert Alejandro Martina, Ramona Sno, Hodan Warsame, Patricia Schor, Amal Alhaag, and Maria Guggenbichler, and the debates that followed.
Education
Ayas holds a B.A. in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia and an MPS from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University.Ayas completed the De Appel Curatorial Training Programme in Amsterdam in 2005, where she unearthed an untapped history of the building of De Appel. Ayas invited artist Michael Blum to re-stage the Dutch looting institution and former Jewish bank named Lippmann, Rosenthal &Co., bequeathing a potent story back into the Dutch contemporary discourse.
Career
Ayas has been a curator of Performa, the biennial of visual art performance in New York founded by RoseLee Goldberg, since its inception in 2005. At Performa, Ayas organized numerous projects and programs with an international roster of acclaimed artists, architects, and writers while overseeing the biennial's architecture, writing, and print programs and its consortium relations. She remains a Curator-at-Large. At Performa's edition in 2023, Ayas recently presented Protest and Performance: A Way of Life, which included performances by Gregg Bordowitz and Pamela Sneed, Rana Hamadeh, and Göksu Kunak. She also co-organized Sonic Tonic Assembly with AGF, Tony Cokes, HxH, and Lamin Fofana a.o..Before joining Performa, she worked as the Public Programs Coordinator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, especially for artists' presentations and critical debates on contemporary art and new media.
As announced by the Gwangju Biennale Foundation, Ayas and Natasha Ginwala served as the artistic directors of the 13th edition of the Gwangju Biennale in 2020. The curatorial duo announced their plans around the exhibition concept of Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning, which emphasized the dialectical space between communal and artificial intelligence shaped by feminist, queer, and Indigenous knowledge. The edition included three publications, including a Feminism reader titled Stronger Than Bone and an online publishing platform, Minds Rising. Additionally, a series of online public programs were organized, including Rising to the Surface: Practicing Solidarity Futures, Augmented Minds and the Incomputable, and a procession titled Through the Gates. The exhibitions featured 40 new commissions by artists such as Korakrit Arunanondchai, Yin-Ju Chen, Vaginal Davis, Patricia Domínguez, Cian Dayrit, John Gerrard, Trajal Harrell, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Gözde İlkin, Sangdon Kim, Liliane Lijn, Candice Lin, Emo de Medeiros, Ana María Millán, Kira Nova, Ana Prvacki, Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Outi Pieski, Angelo Plessas, Gala Porras-Kim, Judy Radul, Sahej Rahal, Jacolby Satterwhite, Alexandra Sukhareva, Sissel Tolaas, Cecilia Vicuña, and Shen Xin, as well as choreographers such as eightOS, Nasa4nasa, and Cecilia Bengolea. The exhibition had to be postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic until April 2021.
At Witte de With, Ayas oversaw a diverse exhibition and publication program devoted to established and emerging visual artists, writers, and filmmakers from across the globe. With her tenure starting, she commissioned and curated long-term research projects, solo and group exhibitions and ambitious live performance programs, including Kunsthalle for Music by Ari Benjamin Meyers, The Music of Ramon Raquello and his Orchestra by Eric Baudelaire, Öğüt & Macuga by Ahmet Öğüt and Goshka Macuga, The Ten Murders of Josephine by Rana Hamadeh, As If It Were by Bik Van der Pol, Relational Stalinism -The Musical by Michael Portnoy, three-part Art in the Age of...series , Bit Rot by Douglas Coupland, Character is Fate by Willem de Rooij, Moderation by artist Heman Chong ; Dai Hanzhi: 5000 Artists ; The Humans – a theatrical play by writer and artist Alexandre Singh – and its monthly summits Causeries ; the open archive and collection Tulkus 1880 to 2018 by artist Paola Pivi, Blueprints by Qiu Zhijie as well as the award-winning exhibition The Temptation of AA Bronson.
Ayas worked on several biennial projects such as artistic director of 2020 Gwangju Biennale, together with Natasha Ginwala, curator of Respiro by Sarkis, at the Pavilion of Turkey in the 56th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale; co-curator the 6th Moscow Biennale ACTING IN A CENTER IN A CITY IN THE HEART OF THE ISLAND OF EURASIA ; curator of the 11th Baltic Triennale ; co-curator of the Istanbul and Bandung city pavilions as part of the Intercity Project of the 9th Shanghai Biennale. Ayas also served as a curatorial advisor to the 8th Shanghai Biennale and publication advisor to the 8th Gwangju Biennale in 2010.
Ayas co-founded several independent initiatives, including Arthub Asia – an Asia-wide active research and production initiative , producing exhibitions and live productions, including operas and performances, and symposia, within the context of China and the rest of Asia, including by Cao Fei, an opera-drama created with avatar-actors, based on the “model dramas” of Cultural Revolution period, presented in Turin in 2009.
Ayas is the founding co-curator of the Blind Dates Project – an artistic platform dedicated to tackling what remains of the peoples, places, and cultures of the Ottoman Empire.
Ayas was also a curator at the large . She consulted on at Spring Workshop, including collaborations with artists such as Wu Tsang, Qiu Zhijie, Christodoulos Panayiotou, and Heman Chong, among others, working alongside Founder Mimi Brown.
Ayas served on many juries, including the 2024 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research, the 2019 Venice Biennale International Jury, Prince Claus Awards, the Jury for DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, and The Eliasson Global Leadership Prize of the Tällberg Foundation. Ayas was a member of the jury that awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation to Lithuania's pavilion for "Sun & Sea " at the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2019. The jury, chaired by Stephanie Rosenthal, included Ayas alongside Cristiana Collu, Sunjung Kim, and Hamza Walker. Ayas is currently a board member of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Rijksakademie, Tällberg Foundation, The New Centre for Research & Practice, Collectorspace, Sabanci Museum, and Protocinema.
When the Istanbul Biennial’s advisory board unanimously chose Ayas as curator for the event's 2024 edition, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts rejected the board's recommendation and instead appointed Iwona Blazwick; at the time of her selection, Blazwick was a serving member of the advisory panel tasked with choosing a curator for the biennial. Responding to public criticism, Blazwick stepped down in early 2024.
Publications
Ayas is a publisher, editor, and contributor to several books, including:- Stronger Than Bone by Defne Ayas, Natasha Ginwala and Jill Winder
- Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning by Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala
- Blessing and Transgressing: A Live Institute by Defne Ayas
- Wdw Review Vol.1.1: Arts, Culture, and Journalism in Revolt by Defne Ayas and Adam Kleinman
- Wdw Review Vol.1: Arts, Culture, and Journalism in Revolt by Defne Ayas and Adam Kleinman
- How to Gather: Acting Relations, Mapping Positions by Defne Ayas and Bart De Baere
- Were It As If by Defne Ayas and Bik Van Der Pol
- Causeries by Alexandre Singh
- Unicorns in a Blueprint by Qiu Zhijie
- Art in the Age of...
- Bit Rot by Douglas Coupland
- Character Is Fate Piet Mondrian’s Horoscope
- Respiro by Sarkis
- End Note: Moderation 2012-2014
- Erik van Lieshout: Home South
- Performa 13
- The Crime Was Almost Perfect
- Performa 11: Staging Ideas
- Performa 09:
- The Making of Meeting
- Füsun Onur
- Performa