Mapping Solidarity for Palestine

Join us for a participatory workshop and a film screening of the short film 'Happiness'. In collaboration with audiences, Mapping Solidarity Group and Image Acts Collective will map the solidarity networks for Palestine in Amsterdam through a participatory workshop and a film screening. Mapping Solidarity Group invites art workers, activists and audiences to a mapping workshop in order to reflect on recent pro-Palestine actions and boycotts in cultural and public spaces: what has worked, where have we fallen short, and how to strengthen our networks to avoid fragmentation and consolidate our strategies towards affective aims? In this workshop, we will create a map together to serve as an active tool for documentation and strategy building. This session is a continuation of the Mapping Solidarity Project, in collaboration with platform BK.
The mapping workshop will be followed by a screening of the short film “Happiness” by the Image Acts Collective (Fırat Yucel and Aylin Kuryel). This desktop documentary with a very personal take maps various protests and solidarity actions in Amsterdam as well as bringing the roles of social media and the web into discussion. The evening will be followed by a Q&A, moderated by artist Deniz Buga. Together with Aylin Kuryel Assistant Professor in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam Fırat Yücel Documentary maker & film editor

About the speakers

Aylin Kuryel is an Assistant Professor in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her research areas are nationalism, image politics, aesthetics/resistance, and the politics of emotions. She is the (co-)editor of Utanca Bakmak (Looking at Shame, Cogito, 2023), Sıkıntı Var (Essays on Boredom, İletişim Press, 2020), Being Jewish in Turkey: A Dictionary of Experiences (Türkiye’de Yahudi Olmak: Bir Deneyim Sözlüğü, Iletisim Press, 2017), Küresel Ayaklanmalar Çağında Direniş ve Estetik (Resistance and Aesthetics in the Age of Global Uprisings, İletişim Press, 2015), and Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas and Possibilities (Rodopi, 2010). She has been involved in projects as an artist and is working as a documentary filmmaker. Among her documentaries are The City and the Messiah (2024), Translating Ulysses (2023), A Defense (2021), CemileSezgin (2020), The Balcony and Our Dreams (2020), Heads and Tails (2018), Welcome Lenin (2016). She is part of the Image Acts collective.

Fırat Yücel is a documentary maker and film editor based in Amsterdam and Istanbul. He collaborates with Aylin Kuryel under Image Acts to produce essayistic documentaries and curates video series for Altyazı Fasikül: Free Cinema in Istanbul. Only Blockbusters Left Alive (2016), Audience Emancipated: The Struggle for the Emek Movie Theater (2016), Heads and Tails (2019), March 8, 2020: A Memoir (2020), and Translating Ulysses (2023) are among his documentaries. The anthology film for which he served as artistic director, Seen Unseen: An Anthology of (Auto)Censorship (2024), premiered internationally at the 54th International Film Festival Rotterdam and was screened at MoMA Doc Fortnight, as well as CPH:DOX. He was a fellow at BAK Utrecht’s Fellowship for Situated Practice 2023-2024. His latest short, happiness (2025), premiered at Visions du Réel, is part of a trilogy on desktop cinema.

Deniz Buga, Istanbul, 1982. Currently lives in Amsterdam. Their film, video, and photography works primarily focus on urbanism, minority politics, and queer stances. Their work was presented at various film festivals and museums, including the San Sebastian Film Festival, Oxford Modern Art Museum, Centre Pompidou, and C/O Berlin. Buga was a resident artist at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam.