I met Steven Cohen in the aftermath of my son Kai’s death. Suicide fractures time and dislocates the psyche from its familiar coordinates. One enters an elsewhere where language thins, chronology disintegrates, and the world continues with an indifference that feels obscene. Grief does not arrive as feeling alone. It embeds itself in the body. It alters breath, posture, and attention. It becomes a way of inhabiting the world.
It was from within this altered state that Steven and I began to communicate. Not long letters. Not explanations. Small notes, offered sparingly, with instinctive care. He was writing from inside his own wound, following the death of his partner, Elu. There was no hierarchy between our losses, no attempt to stabilise or redeem them. What passed between us was recognition. Loss speaking to loss without performance.
This resembled a form of mourning that resists resolution. Not recovery, not closure, but cohabitation with absence. The dead were not placed behind us. They were carried. Freud’s early articulation of melancholia, before it was medicalised and stripped of its ethical weight, offers a closer register here. Loss remains active because it has become constitutive of the self. Steven did not stand outside my grief offering perspective. He sat inside it while remaining fully inside his own.
I had been observing Steven’s performance work for years before this meeting. Drawn to it, deliciously disturbed by it, unable to look away. His work already spoke the language of psychic fracture. The body appeared as archive rather than representation. Memory, violence, desire, grief inscribed directly onto flesh. There was no symbolic repair offered. Loss remained active, organising perception rather than yielding to it.
When we eventually began to speak directly, first and only through Facebook, the familiarity was immediate and unsettling. It felt strangely pre-existing, as though I already knew him. As though we had met before, perhaps in another register, another realm, a simultaneous world running alongside this one. Psychoanalytically, it carried the quality of recognition that precedes biography. In Lacanian terms, it resembled a meeting in the register of the Real, where trauma, death, and desire resist symbolisation.
Before I had ever spoken to Steven, my life partner Sipho and I were making a film together, later titled Black. I remember wanting to include fragments of Steven’s performance work within it. I did not know him. I assumed it would be impossible. I was drawn particularly to the idea of returning to his iconic township performances, not as homage or citation, but as disturbance. Something that would unsettle the frame rather than sit obediently within it. At the time, the impulse was intuitive. After Kai’s death, it became legible.
Steven Cohen’s performance art remains among the most confrontational and intellectually uncompromising bodies of work produced in South Africa. It does not soothe or reassure. It exposes power, whiteness stripped of innocence, queerness under siege, and the intimate proximity between everyday normality and structural violence. His body does not operate as softened metaphor. It functions as a charged site. Drag, nudity, prosthetics, ritual, pain, abjection appear as psychic necessity rather than aesthetic excess. They bring into view what is habitually sanitised or expelled: racial terror, queer vulnerability, colonial residue, the unresolved afterlife of apartheid violence.
As a white South African, Cohen does not position himself outside history. His work carries implication, contamination, vulnerability, shame, and desire simultaneously, without appeal for absolution. This refusal matters. It resists moral purity and the fantasy of ethical distance. His body enters political space as a marked body rather than an explanatory one.
His performances refuse closure. They linger. They leave residue. They provoke anger, revulsion, discomfort, sometimes outright hostility. These responses reveal how quickly tolerance collapses when confronted with a body that will not behave, will not reassure, will not resolve itself into legibility. Civility reveals itself as conditional.
Julia Kristeva’s articulation of abjection offers a crucial lens here. The abject names what the subject expels in order to stabilise itself, yet remains disturbingly close: blood, decay, fragility, excess. Cohen’s work does not eject the abject to restore coherence. He draws it back into the body and allows it to remain. Disturbance arises because the psychic maneuver of expulsion is refused. Contradiction is held rather than resolved.
This abjection exists alongside a spiritual attentiveness that does not bypass horror but moves directly through it. His work carries historical catastrophe without didactic naming. One senses the Holocaust as an unresolved inheritance moving thr
One senses the Holocaust as an unresolved inheritance moving through the body rather than memory alone. Gaza enters the same psychic field as present-tense annihilation, evidence that the machinery of destruction persists while civilisation maintains its cultivated speech. These violences exist as pressure rather than argument, as proximity rather than abstraction.
Fragility remains central. His body is small, robust, dancerly. There is something moth-like in his presence, drawn toward illumination while remaining acutely vulnerable to it. The sculptural shoes force the body into precarity. Elevation carries consequence. His feet bleed. Pain registers without metaphor. The body bears what history demands.
Against this, his face painting appears luminous, playful, almost whimsical in surface effect. This contrast is not decorative. It stages animism in a postmodern register. Beauty exists above the bloodied feet, not in denial of them. His face shape-shifts continuously. Elven, plant deva, fae, lepidopteran. A mythical creature that belongs neither fully to the human nor the symbolic. Identity loosens. The body appears to inhabit multiple realms simultaneously.
This shape-shifting operates as animism without nostalgia. Spirits are not external emblems but internal states. The body becomes inhabited by histories, affects, and temporalities at once. One senses chrysalis rather than costume. A being in continual becoming, bound to the pain of existence yet discovering its own exquisiteness within it.
There is meticulous planning in Steven’s performances, yet the work also feels guided by intuition, by a primordial intelligence that precedes rational sequencing. Something older than strategy moves through the body. Wings flutter, shudder, catch alight. Intelligence appears as ecstatic movement, at once free and constrained.
Love remains present. Elu is not absent from the work. His death is carried as devotion rather than memorial. A fidelity that continues to move through the body. The work understands that love does not end but reorganises itself.
Steven Cohen’s work cannot be contained by South Africa, though it is marked by it. It exceeds geography and singular political moments. And yet because it is embodied, it is necessarily geopolitical. The body becomes the site where global power, historical catastrophe, and intimate vulnerability converge. His work belongs in Paris as much as Pretoria, Berlin as much as Cape Town. Placement matters more than borders.
In time, it became clear why his work belonged inside the film Sipho and I were making, a film grounded in Black Consciousness. Not as explanation or illustration, but as disturbance from within. His body carries history rather than narrating it. Consciousness emerges through the body before it becomes thought.
Steven’s entry into my psychic space during the most intense period of my bereftness felt like finding a firefly as a child. Not hope. Something quieter. Bearableness. A small illumination that does not dispel darkness but allows one to remain inside it. He appeared as shaman and nature spirit who gave form to Kai’s ephemeral beauty, his push and pull with the world, his otherworldly whimsy and delicate gravity. There is a resonance there that feels connected to Elu, as though love and loss circulate through the same current. I have only ever spoken to Steven through Facebook, and yet I write as if I know him, because in a psychic sense I do. In the way one knows a brief sliver of a star, a brush with source. I look forward to walking his journey in his final exhibition.
* Steven Cohen’s retrospective exhibition, Steven Cohen: Long Life, runs at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town from December 12, 2025 to June 30, 2026, with an opening preview on December 11, 2025.
* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, poet, and uncompromising social justice activist. Founder of Media for Justice and co-owner of handHeld Films, she is recognised for hard-hitting documentaries and incisive opinion pieces that dismantle whiteness, neoliberal capitalism, and imperial power.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of or Independent Media.
