To open the exhibition Forgive Us Our Trespasses / Vergib uns unsere Schuld, multidisciplinary artist Steven Cohen performs DEFACE (2024). During the performance the artist creates an intimate self-portrait that emerges as he ‘defaces’—a post-performance ritual as a practice of simultaneously destroying and creating an artwork bearing the memory of the performance The resulting portrait, part of the series There is Glitter in my Soup! , stands for itself as the facade of a spectral being; a face that outwardly manifests the process of stripping off what was previously inhabited.

With a practice that occupies visual, performance, and performing arts spaces, Cohen has orchestrated radical interventions in the public realm, galleries and theatres for more than three  decades. Marked by his upbringing in the context of South African apartheid, Cohen’s radical interventions are subtle yet conspiring provocations that work as direct contestations to the hegemonic powers that constrict and rule over people and their bodies, recentring those at the margins of society.

Treating the body as a scenographic object, Cohen’s practice collages it with the exuberance manifested in the material cultures of luxury fashion and archaic rituals, mixing critical references from bourgeois, colonial, and queer worlds. Through symbolism-loaded costumes, sculpture-esque high heels, and otherworldly collage-like makeup, Cohen metamorphoses into dazzling chimeras that are likewise disconcerting and hypnotizing; hybrid-creatures of numerous, undefined, intransitive identities. The resulting glitches in the quotidian created by the artist, are not only visually arresting but also display disarming vulnerability prompting those who witness the work to suspend disbelief and question the structures that determine social limits and the reasons behind them.