Dedication: Steven Cohen's late lover inspired his new show

Steven Cohen crawled on his knees with gemsbok horns as footwear when he queued to vote in the 1994 elections; he wore a tutu-like chandelier attached to a corset as he teetered on heels around the Red Ants dismantling an informal settlement in Johannesburg in 2001; he seemingly emptied his bowels while suspended above his partner Elu during a dance festival; and he tied a live rooster to his penis at  the Eiffel Tower in 2013, for which he was arrested and found guilty of sexual exhibitionism.

And these are just some iconic Steven Cohen moments.

It is his partner Elu’s death last year, or more precisely the exhibition inspired by his loss, that now brings Cohen back home from France. Titled Put your heart under your feet and walk!, it opened at the Stevenson Johannesburg yesterday,  where it is on show until November 17.

The title refers to the response of Cohen’s surrogate mother, Nomsa Dhlamini, then 96, when he asked her how he was going to survive without Elu (whose adopted name was an acronym for “Elephant Lion Unicorn”).

“How do you function in the face of intolerable grief?  I think the biggest mistake is not to keep moving. Rigidity and petrification are the enemy of life,” says Cohen.

No wonder he has Dhlamini’s words tattooed under his left foot, the stronger leg which supports him when dancing.

The Cohen I meet is the mind and the passion, sans sensationalism. He laughs about how fellow South African artist Kendall Geers, who lives in Belgium, invited him to give a talk at the fine art museum there. He arrived at lunchtime and, helping himself to a sandwich, overheard Geers commenting  that the homeless had simply pitched up to partake of the food.

“I said: ‘Hello Kendall,’” he relates, in a dramatically resonant tone.

• Read the full story on the Sunday Times website