Navigating ethics and art

Stephen Cohen's retrospective Long Life at Iziko exposes tensions between curatorial freedom, institutional responsibility, and the ethics of display in South Africa's national museums

- Lesego Chepape

When visitors entered the Iziko South African National Gallery for the opening of Steven Cohen's retrospective Long Life on 11 December 2025, they were confronted not only by art but by its deliberate concealment. Several works were covered with black cloth.

The gesture was unmistakable. Something had gone wrong — not only with the exhibition but with the institution itself.

What has since unfolded is more than a dispute between a curator and a museum. It is a public reckoning with how South Africa's cultural institutions understand ethics, authority, and care — and how quickly the language of responsibility can slide into the practice of censorship when institutional processes fail.

At the centre of the controversy is Long Life, a long-awaited retrospective of Cohen's work and Dr Anthea Buys, the independent curator appointed to realise it. Arrayed against them is Iziko Museums of South Africa, a national institution attempting to reconcile its stated commitment to artistic freedom with its obligations to staff, audiences and historically marginalised communities.

The first thing to understand about Long Life is that it was not rushed. Cohen was officially invited to present a retrospective at Iziko in November 2022 but discussions about such an exhibition stretch back more than a decade — to 2012, when Buys was employed by Iziko as curator of contemporary art.

"The vision of realising the exhibition has been carried by myself and by a sequence of internal Iziko curators over the years," Buys notes in her public statement.

"When I took up my role in early 2024, I made the contents of the exhibition available for perusal via video files, images, texts and websites," she writes, adding that most of the works are already publicly accessible online.