Rukel Film

video , Language , Ghost word , spirituality , to write , residency , Publication , performance , Literary , Body , LGBTIQ+ , installation , History , Gender , Sound , photographs , movie ,Experimental , Education , Documentary , Diaspora , Decolonization , Autobiographical , Audiovisual , Artistic research , Archives

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Mayıs Rukel is a Turkish artist, published writer, and filmmaker. His work explores decolonial archiving, speculative narrative, magical research, liberatory remembering, radical pedagogies, queer memory, and befriending ghosts. He received the GRA Award for Autonomous Arts 2020 and Mondriaan Fund Artist Start 2023. His short fiction The Pendant was featured at the Nederlands Film Festival 2020, and his feature-length fiction-documentary Movement Song had its world premiere at the IFFR 2026. His debut novel, Güneşhamağı, was published by Ithaki in April 2026.

He participated in the research group Tactics of the Plot in 2025, where a diverse group of artists, researchers, and activists examined their practices through Sylvia Wynter's concept of the plot. In 2022, he participated in the Atelier AM residency, and the resulting multimedia performance 'To get from one place to another' was shown at the Corrosia Theater in Almere. He holds a BFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and an MFA from the Sandberg Institute's Ecologies of Transformation, where he explored the role of art and artists in social change.

In February-March 2026, Rukel received the Mondriaan Fund Voucher International to organize public events with Taragaon Next and Sattya Collective in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Rukel is the co-facilitator of Radical Roots, a community-building art project based on stories of food and migration in the refugee centers across the Netherlands. His collaborations include KABK, TENT Rotterdam, and IMPAKT, and his work has been reviewed in De Volkskrant, Het Parool, Metropolis M, Cine21, (A)WAKE, Filmkrant, and more.

**Güneşhamağı (Hammock of Sun, 2026)** - Published by the leading Turkish fiction publisher İthaki in April 2026, Güneşhamağı is a debut novel about exile, return, and belonging. After eleven years in exile, a young man, Orman Hardalkedi, and his grandmother, Kibrit, return to their hometown of Güneşhamağı in a fictionalized Turkey; a place where much has been forgotten, and where they arrive with the purpose of remembering. Through their return, the novel asks how a home, a family, and a shared history might be reconstructed through the determined, careful, and intuitive organization of love. Moving between political fantasy, adventure, family history, and poetic worldbuilding, Güneşhamağı explores migration, grief, resilience, identity, modernity, and the sacred. At its heart is the possibility of belonging: the ways people care for one another, preserve what is threatened with disappearance, and make life possible again after immense losses. The novel carries the atmosphere of a nostalgic summer; the afterimage of sunlight filtering through leaves, harvested strawberries, freshly baked rosemary bread, honey, thyme, and the sensory traces through which a lost world can return.

**Movement Song (2026)** - Blending fiction and documentary, Movement Song follows young researcher Noa DaCosta in the wake of heartbreak as she traces a trail from Amsterdam to James Baldwin's final homespace in St. Paul-de-Vence, where an encounter with the living archive in Jill Hutchinson's care transforms her grief into a new understanding of memory and belonging, revealing a radical proposition: It is love that holds archive. Traces of an exile or a final home can be difficult to see on the surface due to erasure. Who is allowed to put down roots? Whose home is only temporarily tolerated? Whose tangible legacies are seen as worthy of protection? What makes an enduring homespace? Movement Song is a fiction-documentary hybrid feature, weaving an experimental narrative form. Noa's journey from Amsterdam to Southern France halfway through the film unearths the documentary layer, as she encounters the tangible remnants of James Baldwin's legacy: his typewriter, letters, LPs, Légion d'honneur, paintings, books, and more. This archive is preserved not in a formal institution, but in the intimate care of Jill Hutchinson, the beloved partner of Baldwin's late brother David. Noa arrives with the weight of her own grief, only to witness how Jill has been safeguarding the archive through grief and love. This encounter becomes a portal of healing, both for Noa, and for the trajectory of the film.

**The Pendant (2020)** - Breaking of a mirror initiates five different acts in five different places, exposing shades of magic, and the brutal logic of systemic violence. The harm social systems are designed to inflict, the enforced disappearances in Türkiye in the 1990s, the border politics of the EU, manipulative storytelling and struggle for domination are evoked, as the round Pendant with its gemstones scattered across the acts attempts to become whole again.

Collaboration with Taragaon Next and Sattya Collective in Kathmandu, Nepal

Date: 02-03-2026 t/m 04-05-2026

Location: Taragaon Next and Sattya Collective

In association with: Taragaon Next, Sattya Collective

I have received the Mondriaan Fund International Voucher to organize two-months of public art events in Kathmandu, Nepal, in collaboration with Taragaon Next and Sattya Collective. The events included a two-day workshop for intuitive methods for filmmaking, a critical reading gathering on texts of Audre Lorde and James Baldwin, an artist lecture at Kathmandu's leading contemporary art museum Taragaon Next, a collaborative somatics and music workshop with Maitri Music Therapy Nepal, and more.

https://www.mayisrukel.com/nepal-2026

This artist has no awards yet.