Performance artist Steven Cohen describes his often controversial, but always memorable, performances as a “digital painting of a social reality, half beautifully imagined, half horribly real.”

His latest exhibition titled; put your heart under your feet … and walk!, is an intense meditation on loss, grief and absence that Cohen created following the death of his partner and artistic collaborator, the dancer Elu, in 2016. The work first came into being as a performance piece, which debuted at the Montpellier Danse festival in June this year.

Cohen has described the exhibition as "an expression of accepting my destiny in not dying alongside Elu, an experiment in how to deal with survivor guilt in an effort to keep my amputated heart still beating, in how to bear tribute to our lives so richly danced in poverty".

The exhibition takes the form of an installation of sculptural objects and a two-screen projection. In the installation Cohen brings together myriad pointe shoes – among them Elu’s, literally invoking his absence – that are collaged together with found objects and 'embedded with histories, ideologies, beliefs'.

In Stevenson's second gallery space, the physical reality of death is forcefully reasserted with the screening of Cohen’s performative intervention at an abattoir, a gruesome and bloody scene for a powerful performance by the artist that 'embodies a deeply felt pain and empathy for all living, suffering beings'.

Exhibition opening event Sat Oct 21 from 10:00.