Nadim Choufi: A Dragon in the Halls of Diplomacy

Pickle Bar, Stephanstraße 11, 10559, Berlin

September 10, 2026 – September 10, 2026

Nadim Choufi, a visual artist born in Lebanon and living in the Netherlands, presents a performance by a poet who sends his last poem to his editor and asks him to find the monster described in it. The performance accompanies this search through poetry, love, monstrosity and the halls of diplomacy. It is based on Choufi’s latest book, In the Face of the Dragon, a cento poem composed entirely of lines by more than ninety Arab poets, many of whom have been translated into English for the first time. In these voices, poets, lovers and entire peoples transform into animals, landscapes and elemental forces to create protective forms of love and resistance in the face of destruction and dehumanization. The performance is part of the Wing Wing program curated by Michał Grzegorzek and Anastasia Marukhina at Pickle Bar, which explores politics as contemporary mythology. Through drag, persona and monstrous embodiment, power and identity are revealed performatively, overstated and reimagined.