Steven COHEN (b. 1962)
BIOGRAPHY
Steven Cohen is a performer, choreographer and visual artist who was born in South Africa, and now lives in France.
His works as a visual artist have been regularly exhibited around the world since the 1980s.
From 2003 to 2008, Cohen and his partner, Elu Kieser, were associated artists of the Ballet Atlantique/Régine Chopinot in La Rochelle, France.
His work brings to light that which lies on the margins of society, beginning with his own identity as a gay, Jewish, white, South African man. The staging of his body is influenced by his own story and history and constitutes a means to exploring the flaws and grace of humanity. His ultra-sophisticated makeup is as elegant as it is surprising. His eccentric costumes, intense and ethereal at the same time, borrow from the world of luxury and elegance, from archaic rituals, from a bourgeois or colonial past as well as diverse queer inspirations. They reveal more than they hide and restrict the body and the movement, as if to simultaneously mark both the weight of the world and the restraining force different powers exert on the body. They are also montages or collages created with the body itself, that transform it into chimeras or hybrid-beings whose identity is uncertain, multiple and fluid.
He has orchestrated interventions in public places, in art galleries or on stages, notably for the Festival d’Automne, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, at the ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival, at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda, at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris, in Montpellier Danse, at the Festival d’Avignon, for the Munich Opera Festival at the Bavarian State Opera, at the Escena Contemporánea Festival in Madrid, at the Bozar in Brussels, at the Oktoberdans festival in Bergen, at the Canadian Stage in Toronto.
He has participated in residencies at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, and the Center for Performance Research in New York.
He runs workshops around the world that question the body as a scenographic object.
Cohen’s visual artist activities are represented by the Mickael Stevenson Gallery in South Africa.