Cape Town

STEVENSON is pleased to present the violence of absence, a solo exhibition by Steven Cohen, his first in Cape Town since 2012.

Comprising video and a selection of the artist’s self-portraits in tape, the violence of absence foregrounds the fundamental concerns of Cohen’s three-decade long performance practice: embodiment, loss, identity, and the dialectic between history and intimacy.

In their inception, the self-portraits were created in the aftermath of his performances, the adhesive tape acting as a tool to remove the adornment and makeup worn by the artist as he brings works such as Boudoir and put your heart under your feet … and walk! to life. At the time, he wrote:

I apply my makeup for hours with a pathological dose of patience and a plethora of glue. The breakdown of it this way is sudden and full of sensation. Removing the makeup leaves me feeling pulled and slapped and plucked and stripped. After the ritual of de-facing my cosmetically enhanced performance self, I feel gently flayed and beyond fragile ... as naked as the bare bones of a de-powdered butterfly wing. It is strange to make a work by unmaking one.

Five years later, the works selected for this exhibition include some tethered to specific performances – of Boudoir (Barcelona, 2024) and iBall (Montpellier, 2022). Others were created in the studio to commemorate events – the first Covid lockdown, the French legislative elections (a response to his not being permitted to vote), Cohen’s life partner Elu’s ‘re-birthday’ – or simply as research on the journey of aesthetic experimentation. Incorporating materials such as a taxidermied bat alongside makeup, butterfly wings, jewels, glitter and his DNA, Cohen approaches the face as an interface; as with the rest of his body during performances, he abstracts it to produce a new inventory of gestures and expressions. He continues:

they started off as simply ‘this is me’ … now they are ‘this is fabulous kaleidoscopic dazzling me’ ... They are like death masks/life masks with a trademark lipsmack that says ‘i remember’.

Showing alongside the tape portraits are two videos drawn from Boudoir, Cohen’s most recent performative-installation. The full iteration of Boudoir, which has travelled to institutions and festivals including Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, Centre Pompidou in Paris and Théâtre National de Bretagne, collages references, objects and actions to ‘reveal how interior conflicts, representations, oppressions and laws all intertwine’. The first of the two films, Struthof, depicts Cohen’s 2022 performance in the vicinity of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in Alsace, France - the only concentration camp established by the Germans on French soil, and particularly notorious for its collection of Jewish skeletons and conducting anatomical experiments on homosexuals. Struthof addresses the mourning entangled with Cohen’s Jewish lineage and queerness, dually offering remembrance and a stark reminder of how cruelty and barbarism occur with state sanction. The artist subjects himself to intense fear and pain in an act of extreme empathy, writing:

I have no illusion of being a self-immolating martyr, nor delusions that I could be Joan of Arc ... and I know that I am not a witch, just that I set my stakes high. I strongly discourage self-injurious undertakings from participants in the performance art workshops that I give, although ordeals are acceptable

That said, in my own art – I make my own choices! and in real life, conducting my way through the battlefield that realising radical performance art is (especially in a safety-seeking commerce-mad world) – things sometimes take unexpected turns

This work for video was experimental and I discovered that it is not uninteresting to fail. yes, it hurts ... but pain lasts shorter than shame. I cannot bear the regret that comes of having failed to try ... so I always have and always will. try, I mean ... and accept to maybe not succeed

 for me, art is about forging responses through authentic image-making ... and that demands risk-taking. and I differentiate between hurt and harm. And I trust in healing

 In Kabbalah, the Hebrew letter 'shin' can be associated with fire.
And with transformation. I feel changed I understand that fear is built into the body, and that it can only barely be monitored by the mind and that we have what it takes to survive ourselves, if we allow us to!

Also, that a turn for the worse, bravely borne, can turn again and be for the better. We know ourselves with increased understanding when we can look back on the consequences of our actions

At the risk of sounding sanctimonious, I try to take care ... and I hope to make care ... in a society that seems to lack that

if we were only able to see each other’s internal wounds, I’m sure the world could be a kinder place

The relationship between lineage and mourning is articulated in even more intimate terms in over my dead body, a work excerpted from Cohen’s longer video piece Cemetery (2022). Filmed at the Westpark Jewish Cemetery and Holocaust Memorial in Johannesburg, the artist is seen lying atop his mother’s grave, naked aside from adornments, passing salt through his hands as if in ritual. Drawing attention to how it is only in the eyes of dogma that love becomes desecration, the artist continues:

My late mother Ann often used to say ‘over my dead body!’ so yes then, why not? This is a work not made in defiance nor in revolt – and especially not in disrespect. Radical yes, but with absolute love and reverence for a most exceptional mother, the only one I could have ever had who would love me as I am, who was outrageously proud of whatever I did, even when I undid.

The exhibition opens Saturday opens Saturday 23 August, 10am to 1pm, concurrent with shows by Ian Grose and Moshekwa Langa.