For more than four decades, Steven Cohen’s practice has subversively stretched the conventions of
the socially acceptable. Marked by his upbringing in the context of South African apartheid, Cohen has orchestrated radical interventions that are subtle yet conspiring provocations, and which work as direct contestations to the hegemonic powers that constrict and rule over people and their bodies, recentring those at the margins of society. Two works that demonstrate these aspects of his long trajectory as a poetic disruptor are part of Forgive Us Our Trespasses / Vergib uns unsere Schuld. Performed live during the opening of the exhibition, DEFACE (2024) presents a self-portrait that emerges while the artist does their make-up—a post-performance ritual as a practice of simultaneously destroying and creating an artwork with camouflage cream, powder, glitter, lipstick, butterfly wings, sweat, and skin cells. In COQ/COCK (2013), Cohen hands over the choreo- graphy to a rooster, attached to his genitals via a ribbon, that pulls him in various directions across the Human Rights Square at the Trocadéro in Paris. Using French national symbols, references to the glamour of the Folies Bergère, and his penis, inscribed with identity markers—white, Jewish, queer—Cohen investigates how political structures control (and even pull him along in) his life as a South African citizen residing in France. After being arrested by the police ten minutes into the happening, Cohen was involved in a long, unsuccessful trial to contest a conviction for sexual exhibitionism, contributing to debates around the limits of artistic expression and censorship.

Works in the exhibition: COQ/COCK (2013), 1-channel video, 5' 28''; DEFACE (2024), 1-channel video. Courtesy of the artist and Stevenson Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam