Steven COHEN (b. 1962)
For You a Rose, For Me a Memory
1999
silkscreen on canvas
93 x 85 cm
Pop(E) Art / National Fag
1995
silkscreen on canvas
120 x 240 cm
BIOGRAPHY
Steven Cohen is a performer, choreographer and visual artist who was born in South Africa and lives in France.
Known for his fearless exploration of identity, politics, and belonging, Cohen’s work interrogates themes of sexuality, spirituality, race, freedom, ethics, memory and love. While engaging with universal themes, his work is rooted in deeply personal narratives of love, loss and resilience, beginning with his 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 elaborate makeup and outlandish 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 movement, simultaneously marking 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.
Cohen’s work has been regularly exhibited around the world since the 1980s. He has orchestrated interventions in public places, in art galleries and 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.
From 2003 to 2008, Cohen and his partner, Elu Kieser, were associated artists of the Ballet Atlantique/Régine Chopinot in La Rochelle, France.
The exhibition Steven Cohen: Long Life, a major retrospective showcasing 40 years of pioneering work by the artist, took place at the Iziko South African National Gallery (SANG) (2025–2026), offering an unprecedented look at Cohen’s artistic career, which has shaped the discourse of performance art in South Africa, France, and beyond.
Curated by Dr Anthea Buys and made up of installations, performance documentation, objects, images, films and ephemera, the exhibition offers a loosely chronological survey of Cohen’s life and work, coalescing around key relationships in the artist’s life. From textile-based works from the late 1980s, to documentation of Cohen s uninvited public interventions in the late 1990s and early 2000s, to more recent performances conceived for the stage, the exhibition represents the breadth of a profoundly influential career.