Steven Cohen: Long Life, at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town, offers an unprecedented look at Cohen’s artistic career, which has shaped the discourse of performance art in South Africa, France, and beyond. The retrospective runs from 12 December 2025 to 30 June 2026, showcasing forty years of pioneering work.
Known for his fearless exploration of identity, politics, and belonging, Cohen’s work interrogates themes of sexuality, spirituality, race, freedom, ethics, memory and love. While engaging with universal themes, Cohen’s work is always rooted in deeply personal narratives of love, loss and resilience.
The title, Long Life, is a phrase of condolence in Jewish custom, one that honours those who have passed while offering hope and affirming that to live is a blessing. This sentiment resonates throughout Cohen’s works. Above all, Long Life is about compassion and indignation, belonging and loneliness, and the connections with others that make life worth living.
Profoundly influential career
Made up of installations, performance documentation, objects, images, films and ephemera, the exhibition offers a loosely chronological survey of Cohen’s life and work, coalescing around key relationships in the artist’s life.
From textile-based works from the late 1980s, to documentation of Cohen’s uninvited public interventions in the late 1990s and early 2000s, to more recent performances conceived for the stage, the exhibition represents the breadth of a profoundly influential career.
Curated by Dr Anthea Buys, an independent curator, writer and researcher based in South Africa, the exhibition is supported by the Embassy of France in South Africa, Lesotho and Malawi, the French Institute of South Africa, Institut Français in Paris, Spier Arts Trust, Bright Foundation and other private donors.
What: Steven Cohen: Long Life
Where and when: Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town from 12 December 2025 to 30 June 2026
WS
