Ouvre: Images from Steven Cohen’s work depict, among others, Boudoir, 2022. Photos: Mario Todeschini
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.
This long timeline complicates Iziko’s later claim that its decision not to display certain works followed a “careful internal review”. The ethical questions raised by Cohen’s work were neither unforeseeable nor new. What changed was not the work but the moment at which the institution chose to act.
Just after 10pm on the night before Long Life opened, Buys received an email from Iziko’s senior management instructing her that certain works were to be removed from the exhibition.
The timing is critical. By then, the exhibition had been installed. The opening was hours away. There was no meaningful space left for deliberation, mediation or negotiated resolution.
In its institutional notice, Iziko framed the decision as an ethical imperative. “In presenting this exhibition,” it stated, “we also carry the responsibility to ensure that the works on display align with our institutional values, our ethical commitments and the cultural sensitivities of the communities we serve.”
The museum cited concerns relating to “the historical representation of Black women and the legacy of racialised display”, “cultural principles regarding the dignity and protection of elders”, “unresolved questions about power, agency, and authorship”, its commitments around ancestral human remains and “the potential misinterpretation of highly sensitive symbols in the public domain”.
“This decision reflects our commitment to ethical museum practice, public accountability and the respectful stewardship of the histories and communities we represent,” the notice read.
These concerns sit at the heart of contemporary museum practice. But ethics, like care, is not only a matter of what is decided — it is a matter of how and when.
Buys has been careful to distinguish between the responses of individual staff members and the actions of institutional leadership. She has expressed compassion for Iziko staff — particularly production and installation workers — who encountered some of the works late in the process and experienced them as hurtful or offensive.
These were, she notes, staff members “whose views on the artworks had not been considered by management until the very last minute”.
That observation reveals a deeper institutional failure. Care was not embedded early in the exhibition’s development. It surfaced only at the point of crisis, when the cost of inaction became visible.
Iziko’s notice speaks repeatedly of responsibility and stewardship. But stewardship delayed is stewardship distorted. When ethical concern emerges only at the eleventh hour, it risks functioning less as care than as control.
Rather than removing the contested works entirely, Buys and Cohen negotiated a compromise: the works would be covered with black cloth.
“To remove them would have been to capitulate without discussion,” Buys writes. “We wanted to make visible an occlusion, to register disagreement and to say that we are not afraid of the discomfort that comes from that.”
The black cloth operates as a curatorial refusal — not a denial of harm or disagreement but a refusal to make institutional intervention appear seamless or neutral. It signals that something has been interrupted.
“In fact,” Buys adds, “dissensus is symptomatic of a free society.”
In this way, the exhibition now stages its own conflict. The absence becomes part of the work’s meaning, exposing the institutional conditions under which art is shown — or not shown — in a national gallery.
Underlying the dispute is a fundamental question about trust. Buys argues for an informed audience capable of making its own decisions. Long Life includes written advisories warning visitors about potentially disturbing content.
“My duty as a curator and art historian,” she writes, “is to treat both the artist and the audience with respect.” That respect, for her, involves trusting viewers to choose what they engage with.
Iziko’s position emphasises protection of audiences, of histories, of communities whose representation has long been distorted or violated. The tension between these positions is not easily resolved. But when protection takes the form of last-minute concealment, it raises the question of whether the institution is managing risk rather than engaging complexity.
“Iziko intervened unilaterally and with poor timing,” Buys states, “and the organisation has, as a result, created an avoidable censorship scandal.”
That word, avoidable, is central. Nothing about Cohen’s work suddenly changed on the eve of the opening. What failed was institutional process: delayed engagement and the absence of early, sustained dialogue.
Iziko has committed to hosting public engagements to discuss the exhibition and its curatorial decisions. Such conversations are necessary. But they arrive after a decision has already been enforced, after trust has been eroded and after the exhibition’s meaning has been irrevocably altered.
Long Life was always going to be a difficult exhibition. What it has become is a mirror held up to South Africa’s cultural institutions, reflecting their anxieties, their contradictions and their unresolved relationship to power.
This is not simply a story about censorship versus freedom. It is about governance, timing and the limits of care when institutions act too late. It is about who gets to decide, under what conditions and at whose cost.
“I hear Iziko’s concerns about representation and authorship (though I don’t think they have their facts straight), and am happy to engage in dialogue about a way forward. I just object to the way in which a) the museum acted unilaterally (in contravention of our contract, which states that final curatorial decisions must be reached by agreement between us and them) and b) they gravely misinterpret the works,” Buys concludes.