Images In Action
An evening of film and poetry on witnessing Palestine
How to bear witness to a world that burns before our eyes? Explore with us as we move between screen and street, between images and words, through film and poetry that emerged from the political struggle in solidarity with Palestine, here in Amsterdam.
Student protests have played an important role in making anti-colonial solidarity and resistance visible. The constant flow of images on social media fueled mobilization, as well as exhaustion. Join us as we watch Class Outside (Aylin Kuryel, Deniz Buga, Fırat Yücel, 2026) and Happiness (Fırat Yücel, 2025). Two films that follow how the city and the screen are inhabited, contested, and reclaimed by students who refused. And how bearing witness transforms the way we look at the world and relate to one another. You can check the trailers below.
Alongside the films, Çağlar Köseoğlu will share poems from his manuscript our love is terroristic, written for the end of this world. In the face of violence, where words shrink, harden, or fall silent, poetry reopens them to make space again for addressing and for being with others. The screening and reading will be followed by a conversation with the artists, moderated by Koray Comert.
Films
Happiness (dir: Fırat Yücel, 18 min, 2025) unfolds as a desktop documentary, tracing the experience of living through livestreamed genocide in Palestine, digital overload, and political unrest. Moving across browser windows, messages, and fragments of everyday life, the film reflects on how screens become sites of both exhaustion and mobilization.
Class Outside (dir: Aylin Kuryel, Deniz Buga, Fırat Yücel, 30 min, 2026) shifts the focus to the street. Emerging from the student encampments and protest movements in Amsterdam, the film takes the form of a collective video diary shaped by a broad network of participants. It explores how images are produced within struggle, how they circulate, and how they sustain forms of collective attention and action.
Line-up
Aylin Kuryel
Aylin Kuryel is Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, working across research, filmmaking, and collaborative practices at the intersection of art and politics. Her work focuses on image politics, nationalism, aesthetics and resistance, and the politics of emotions, with particular attention to how images act and mobilize.
Fırat Yücel
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. 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
Deniz Buga, Istanbul, 1982. Currently lives in Amsterdam. Their film, video, and photography work focuses 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.
Çağlar Köseoğlu
Çağlar Köseoğlu is a poet and educator based in Rotterdam. He is the author of the chapbook 34 (Stanza, 2015) and Nasleep [Aftermath] (het balanseer, 2020). In 2025, he was the poet-in-residence at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. Currently, he is working on his next collection onze liefde is terroristisch [our love is terroristic], for which he received a grant from the Dutch Foundation for Literature.
Koray Cömert
Koray Comert, moderator of the evening, is an activist, screenwriter, and rapper. He was raised within the ethos of hip hop: build collective power to fight exploitation and remain true to oneself. With a deep engagement in Socialist Realism, Comert translates lessons from past revolutions into contemporary artistic practice. As the founder of Art for the People, a collective of anti-capitalist artists, he has organized political education sessions for artists in Miami in recent years.
Would you like to attend this program, but don’t have the means to pay for a ticket? Send an email to info@felixmeritis.nl, we can work something out.
Note: By booking this ticket, you agree to potentially be photographed during the event.