Steven Cohen

Born in Johannesburg in 1962, Steven Cohen is a performer and visual artist who lives and works in France. He performs in public spaces, museums, galleries and theatres. His work systematically draws attention to what is marginalised by society, starting with his own identity as a white Jewish South African homosexual. His eccentric costumes borrow from the worlds of luxury and elegance, memories of archaic rituals, bourgeois and colonial memories, and queer inspirations. They reveal more than they conceal, constraining the body and movement as if to mark both the weight of the world and the shackles of power on bodies, but above all they are collages within the body itself, transforming it into chimeras or hybrid beings with uncertain, multiple and fluid identities. In 2013, his 'uninvited' Coq/Cock performance on the Esplanade du Trocadéro led to his arrest for sexual exhibitionism in Paris. Since 2006, his shows have been performed at the Festival d'Automne in Paris on several occasions.