IF YOU ARE easily offended, you need go no further than South African born artist Steven Cohen’s work. It contains – and has done for the last 40 years or so – a vast bouquet of associations and ideas that might make you afraid, turn your nose up, and have you fleeing for the safety of easy art. The work contains everything from explicit reflections on gay and antisemitic persecution and outrage to an experience of being hated, from nudity to gatecrashing of events, from societal taboos to images of death: these are not shlocky shock artworks, but viewed collectively, are about an earnest life’s attempt at excavating meaning and broken truths experienced by the artist himself.

This major retrospective of the South African-born artist who is venerated all over the world, and who has lived for 23 years in France, is an important triumph for Cohen himself, curator Anthea Buys and Iziko as an establishment, for inviting him home to show his life’s work, in the first place. Entitled Long Life, this major show, which has been more than two years in direct planning, is scheduled to remain up at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town, until 30 June 2026.

Fear, censorship and jiving to the work

And normally, the circumstances and politics surrounding an exhibition are maybe part of the press release and shouldn’t ever filter into a critical response to the show itself, but with a surprise turn of events, some 24 hours before the official opening, on 11 December, Iziko’s decision makers muscled their way into the show, proclaiming certain works taboo to a local public.

In the narrative of things, they gave both Cohen and Buys a curious option: remove the works considered offensive, or mask them. They opted for the latter, and chose black cloths to do the masking in question. Masking of works deemed offensive adds mischievously (and unintentionally) to the wealth and mystery of the oeuvre, and while for the first couple of days after the opening, it kept social media alive and seething with anger, official statements and online spiteful and supportive comments, some of which which were rapidly erased, the status of the show, with roughly a dozen moments in the artist’s long and dedicated body of work, behind sheets of black fabric, is potent.

So, rather than entering a big old museum space, and having to circumspectly and respectfully walk through it, hands behind your back and look at one painting after another, until you go numb with boredom, you are pushed into a whole range of activities. You have to bend low to look at ballet shoes on the floor and crane your neck too high to reflect on political posters cheekily edited from the 1980s. You have to rethink crockery and furniture as surfaces for images of erect penises and cockroaches, the Voortrekker monument and Verwoerd with plaits, like Alice in Wonderland, and you even get to write on upholstery.

You have to lift up “shrouds” protecting you from the works which lie beneath them, and contemplate that protection. It’s like a peep show. The gesture is attractive, feels naughty and ultimately is rude. Those “shrouds” pretend to be what the show is about. They’re not. And they are. And you have to experience it.

But in continuing to be physically and intellectually engaged in this exhibition, you must also watch and listen, both actively with earphones and passively without effort, at sounds which filter ambiently through the nine rooms of the exhibition and speak to each other.

Rich veins of Elu

The work of Cohen’s soul-mate and collaborative partner, Elu, who died suddenly after a brief illness in 2016, is represented with some gorgeous pieces and is honoured fleetingly through the show in rich veins which you need to explore with care. His work Hijack, performed in 2003 in the streets of Rosebank, Johannesburg predates much public art in this country. His dance work Dancing with nothing but heart, from the same period does the same. But you must look closely to find them. The image from Dancing

In all this looking and relooking, bending and stretching, you may see something you thought you saw and return with your glasses on to make sure you did see it. And there are thousands of ideas here. From a giant toothbrush sullied by Viennese dust to a frock made of a secondhand car tyre and another of a disused French chandelier. There’s a giraffe’s head and neck and a box from cremated ashes: the precious, the profane all in a beautiful conglomeration of events. There is respect paid to deceased mothers and the horror of hate reflected on levels that will leave you weak in the legs and unable to function because there are stories there that resonate with your own.

So, what’s been deemed by the museum’s management to be too much for you and I to see? Not the nuns fondling donkey genitals, nor the ostriches being intimate with Victorian women. Not the defacing of the images of public figures such as Nelson Mandela. Not even the representation of hatred of and violence against Jews. The verboten material is present in images of skulls and breasts, essentially. And it feels arbitrary, specious and destructive to the exhibition. You want to censor the work? Understand it, first.

Golgotha, Cradle, circumscribed

Firstly, the black shrouds take bites out of a reading of Cohen’s 2009 work, Golgotha. It’s a very important work in his chronology engaging with the throwaway nature of society and the suicide of his brother, Mark. The work, which first saw light of day at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, features such elements as shoes that have real human skulls as their instep. Cohen is known for his over-the-top footwear, and this pair is particularly significant. The skulls were legally purchased at a shop in Soho, New York. They were fashioned into shoes by a boat-maker in France, with Cohen’s blueprint. Their provenance is vague. And thus, they’re illegal in this country, because they are human remains, and belong ethically more appropriately in a grave than on a stage. However, the shoes themselves are not part of this exhibition. Footage and photographs of the work in performance and in development, are. Iziko has deemed those images inappropriate for your eyes.

In covering over selected images from Golgotha, the monumental horror of violent sibling loss articulated in this work, which has been glowingly received all over the western world, is lost. When you raise a black cloth covering an image, you perform some kind of a ritual which breaks the continuity of your eye and heart as you grapple with the work itself.

Another important work which first saw light of day in 2011 at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, is the Cradle of Humankind, which features Mam’ Nomsa Dhlamini, a Swazi woman who was employed by Cohen’s parents as a domestic servant, when Cohen was a baby, but who developed a repartee with Cohen and Elu over the years that is about the rich and intimate spirit of love and honest collaboration. Yes, Dhlamini has a bare chest in some aspects of this work. Yes, she is a black woman. Yes, she is deceased now – she passed away in 2017. These are the central points which Iziko’s press release raises in objection to the work and in explanation for their urgent need to hide it.

It’s a statement which effectively flattens Dhlamini’s whole identity and her vital role in Cohen’s work, deflating her into an anonymous arbitrary figure, effectively reducing Cohen to the stereotypical white man who exploits black women. This is offensively upside-down in its thinking. It degrades a reading of the work into superficiality and doesn’t allow you, the visitor, to see anything deeper.

One of Cohen’s most controversial works is a video piece made in 2005, featuring Dhlamini, and called Maid in South Africa. It takes Cohen’s aesthetic and purpose to a level which is so violent and recognizable that it blurs racial degradation with how Cohen had racist history in his cross-hairs. That blurring makes you turn from the work with real shock. Iziko covered this work, but did it in such a way that the monitor playing the work seems broken or out of order rather than censored. There is no explanation for why that veiled tv monitor in the corner is off.

Glass houses and broken museums

Indeed, the brokenness of the museum itself sadly runs like a bit of a refrain through the whole experience of the exhibition. Four days after the opening which, given the time of year in Cape Town and the nature of Cohen’s work and his significant international profile, will attract many holiday makers and overseas visitors, there were broken toilets in the museum and even one window was deemed ‘out of order’.

Cohen began his career making silkscreens which he learned to do at the Ruth Prowse School of Art in Cape Town during the 1980s, while on AWOL from the army at the time. Rough Play with Boys and Girls who Kick Arse is an important work from this period. A deeply disturbing one, featuring popular culture juxtaposed with violence, but another casualty in this exhibition and the fracas around it. The owner of the work withdrew it from the exhibition, ostensibly in support of Cohen, and in protest of the museum electing to cover some works. In doing so, however, the absence of the work shrieks painfully. It’s an important cornerstone silkscreen in Cohen’s 1990s period; its omission hurts.

Beyond the black veils

So, politics aside, what do you experience in Long Life? In short, a poetic extrapolation of an enormous body of work into a well-spaced, broadly readable exhibition. The works are tiny and massive, in intimate detail or detail largely glossed over, in photographs from performances and videoed footage. There are objects and scenarios, juxtapositions and constructions of space. There are more hours of watchable footage than you have in a museum day, and it necessitates many visits to see properly and make sure that you see again what you thought you saw.

However, it is not an unflawed experience. The show, which spills over into eight conjoined exhibition spaces, does not present a map, a chronology or the offer of a walkabout, for its plotted six month run. You have to do all the work in finding context, and sometimes, such as in the case of the work Golgotha, much of that context is lost or hidden.

Some works have more harsh light on them than they should. The beautiful filming of Cohen’s performed work Put Your Heart under your Feet …  and Walk! is presented in the broad gallery space. Not inside a black-painted, walled off section, as Chandelier is, for instance. The same applies to the work Boudoir, where there is a bleed of light from a clerestory gap in the museum’s structure: a light in a storeroom on the other side is permanently on. As a result, both of these works are sadly bleached to the viewer’s eye.

Secrets and interstices

Also, there are many works hidden or discoverable in the interstices of this exhibition. Some are represented in small glass cabinets of objects, others in filmed footage. Arguably four of Cohen’s most important and strongest works – West Park Cemetery, Taxidermy I and II and Struthof – are not easily findable, loaded as they are, after the video footage of Boudoir. These brief works offer an understanding of the ethos and terror, the aesthetics and skill of a mature Cohen, now in his early 60s.

The whole body of work on display is punctuated by curtains, which work well thematically and aesthetically in some cases, but not all. At the ‘end’ of the exhibition, you walk through a curtained space and into a group exhibition curated by someone else. You feel disjointed and unsure as to where you are, and why. Conversely, because of this curtain, curious visitors can experience the exhibition backwards, unintentionally, walking in to Put Your Heart…, a work created in the maturity of Cohen’s vision.

A house of shivah

Cohen’s Jewish identity has always been central to his approach to artmaking. From the rich taboos associated with censorship, to the generational hatred and destruction of European Jewry from which Cohen originates, to traditions that are turned on their heads. He’s never sidestepped the difficulty of being a Jew in a conservative community.

The title of his show, Long Life, is a conventional expression used to console a Jew after the death of a loved one, but unwittingly, and almost laughably, Iziko plays into these premises. It is traditional in a Jewish house of mourning to cover mirrors and artworks with glass with a sheet, during the first seven days after a funeral, known as ‘shivah’ to eliminate vain reflections, and promote internal reflections about the loss of the person being mourned. With its cloths to black out art works, Iziko creates a sense of mourning in the exhibition that is noteworthy and provocative.

Ultimately, it has sadly turned into a cliché for a person who is loved all over the world, but vilified in the country of his birth. Many of South Africa’s artists have experienced this kind of inability for the country to appreciate what they have until the rest of the world acknowledges them. Cohen’s narrative in his life and in this exhibition sets this tale into very clear focus. And depressingly that knee-jerk response of censorship is the grist of Cohen’s mill, from the early days when his work was deemed too full of penises for the apartheid powers that be, to the way in which woke thinking, politically-correct powers and officials can only really understand Cohen as a white man.

• Long Life, a 40-year retrospective exhibition of Steven Cohen’s work is curated by Anthea Buys at Iziko, South African National Museum and is scheduled to remain on show until 30 June 2026.