Steve Cohen

THE CRADLE OF HUMANKIND

©John Hodgkiss

THE CRADLE OF HUMANKIND

Steven Cohen

Cabaret de curiosités | # Revue 6 > Danse | samedi 11 juin > 19h | studio

http://www.lephenix.fr/saison/cabaret-de-curiosites/the-cradle-of-humankind

 

Performer sud-africain qui défie la loi des genres, Steven Cohen s’est consacré pendant vingt ans à la création d’œuvres plastiques exposées largement dans le monde entier. Parallèlement, il développe des performances artistiques dans différents espaces tels que les scènes, les musées, les galeries d’art et les lieux publics insolites (stations de taxis, champs de courses, centres commerciaux, etc.) ou dans des lieux où il n’a pas été invité.

Il apparaît de façon inopinée et souvent importune. Ses performances explorent plusieurs moyens d’expression et abordent différentes questions identitaires liées à la judaïté, à l’homosexualité, au racisme ou à l’identité ethnique. Son regard critique sur notre société fait de lui un des artistes les plus engagés et militants des arts de la scène.

Les artistes Latitudes Prod. sont : Steven Cohen, Emmanuel Eggermont, Rémy Héritier, Latifa Laâbissi, Benoît Lachambre, Louise Lecavalier et Claudia Triozzi

Cette création est dédiée à la mémoire de Merrill Plagis

Coproductions :
Le Quartz - scène nationale de Brest, Les Spectacles Vivants - Centre Pompidou (Paris), Le Festival d’Automne (Paris), le phénix – scène nationale de Valenciennes, La Bâtie – Festival de Genève, le théâtre Garonne (Toulouse), Open Latitudes (Latitudes Contemporaines, Les Halles de Schaerbeek - Bruxelles, L’Arsenic - Lausanne, Le Manège.mons/Maison Folie, Festival Body Mind - Varsovie) avec le soutien du programme Culture de l’Union Européenne.

Avec le soutien de :
La Ville de Lille, de la Drac Nord-Pas de Calais, de la Région Nord-Pas de Calais , Culturesfrance, Du DICREAM, du CRRAV (Centre de Ressources Audiovisuelles) de Tourcoing, du CECN de Mons et du  Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains de Tourcoing.

NEWS: Steven Cohen premieres his major new work, The Cradle of Humankind, at the Festival les Anticodes 2011 in Brest on 16-19 March. Group exhibitions include Space, Ritual, Absence: Liminality in South African visual art at FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg (10 March - 1 April), and ARS 11 at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (15 April - 27 November).

EXHIBITIONS / WORKS

• Life is Shot, Art is Long  (21 January - 6 March 2010)
• Additional silkscreen works (1992-2002)
• Golgotha (work in progress) on Disguise: The art of attracting and deflecting attention  (15 May - 5 July 2008)

PUBLICATIONS

• Life is Shot, Art is Long  (2010)

BIOGRAPHY
Steven Cohen was born in 1962 in South Africa and lives in Lille, France. He is a performance artist who stages interventions in the public realm and in gallery/theatre spaces. He is also an extraordinary crafter of objects, ranging from the sculptural assemblages that form his costumes to the silkscreened canvases and furniture of his early career. His work invariably draws attention to that which is marginalised in society, starting with his own identity as a gay, Jewish man. One of his best-known performances is Chandelier (2001/2), in which Cohen, dressed in vertiginous heels and an illuminated chandelier tutu, interacted with residents of a squatter camp in Newtown, Johannesburg, as it was in the process of being destroyed; the work exists as both live performance and video documentation of the public intervention. Chandelier was presented alongside Dancing Inside Out and Maid in South Africa at the Centre Pompidou in Paris as part of the Festival d'Automne in November 2008; in 2009, Cohen premiered Golgotha at the Centre Pompidou as part of the same festival. Performances in 2010 included Chandelier at the Festival Rayons Frais in Tours, France; Golgotha at the Munich Opera Festival, Bavarian State Opera, Munich; and Chandelier and a new site-specific work, The Wandering Jew, at the first Aichi Triennale, Japan; performances in the first two months of 2011 include Golgotha at Le Centre Chorégraphique National de Tours, France, and at Les Rencontres du Court, Le Bouscat, Bordeaux; Chandelier, Cleaning Time and Maid in South Africa, and Golgotha at Le TAP in Poitiers, France; and Golgotha at the Festival Escena Contemporánea, Madrid. Recent group exhibitions include Dada South? at the South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2009-10); Life Less Ordinary: Performance and display in South African art at the Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham, UK (2009); The Enterprise of Art, Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, Naples (2008); and Under Pain of Death, Austrian Cultural Forum, New York (2008). From 2003 to 2008 he was an associated artist of the Ballet Atlantique/Régine Chopinot. In 2009 Cohen took up residencies at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and the Center for Performance Research in New York. Full CV

For more info see www.at.artslink.co.za/~elu/stevencohen/