Filipka Rutkowska: The Iron Lipstick
As part of Featured 2026
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Stephanstraße 11, 10559 Berlin
The Pickle Bar has limited capacity. Entry is on a first-come, first-served principle.
Accessible to wheelchairs
WC accessible to wheelchairs
Pickle Bar is located on the ground floor of a Gewerbe architecture. The space is accessible only partially. Visitors with limited mobility can access through the main entrance of the building, on the left side of Pickle Bar entrance. Our team assists visitors with a barrier-free request. However, toilets are not adapted to wheelchair access. Stools are available for seating. Visitors with impairments are invited to contact us for questions and assistance on site at [email protected]
As part of the Wing Wing programme, ›The Iron Lipstick‹ combines spoken word and choreography to embody and reimagine Margaret Thatcher as a queer specter, in contrast to her anti-gay political legacy. Inspired by Damian Barr’s memoir Maggie and Me, a queer coming-of-age story set in 1980s Scotland, the work reanimates Thatcher’s iconic speeches to create a political fiction that calls for the abolition of gender in order to imagine a genderless society. By queering a figure synonymous with oppression, the piece stages a paradoxical intimacy with history’s demons, exposing how they resurface today while opening the possibility of taming and transforming them. The performance incorporates a replica of Thatcher’s costume, recently displayed at a Christie’s auction.
The performance is a part of the Wing Wing programme at Pickle Bar, curated by Michał Grzegorzek and Anastasia Marukhina, investigating politics as a form of contemporary mythology, where narratives of power and identity are performed, exaggerated, and reimagined. Through the language of drag, persona, and monstrous embodiment, it reveals how social and political realities can be both exposed and transformed through acts of performance and metamorphosis.
Performance is realised with the generous support of The Adam Mickiewicz Institute.