Nadim Choufi

Lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands

Artist statement

I am a Lebanese artist living in Rotterdam. I primarily work in sculpture, and my sculptural practice extends into performance, text, film, and drawing. My work engages with how states and institutions imagine and implement ideas of progress, whose lives do such visions exclude, and what desires can disrupt them. I am invested in giving form to different notions of progress from marginalized voices that disrupt the ways structures of power seek to organize life, while making possible other ways of living, belonging, and relating to the world. My recent work focuses on diplomacy and Arab poets of dissent. I re-examine the language, architecture, and furniture of diplomacy and human rights, and who they protect and harm, especially since the genocide in Palestine and the ongoing war in Lebanon. Through poetics, monstrosity, and queer desires, I propose different forms and languages to reimagine progress.

Artwork