Sasha Bjerken Cohen (born 2003, New York City) received a BA from Bennington College in dance, visual arts, and creative writing. Since graduating in 2025, he has worked for, collaborated and lived with sculptors Mia Westerlund and Alice Adams in Upstate, NY and NYC.
His paintings are shown at the boutique, Hannoh +, in Brooklyn, NY, and can be found in the private collection of Stacy Kramer.
My practice has evolved into one essentially exploring the nature the body and language.
I believe the body re-constitutes culture, thought, gender, sexuality, identity, and so much more, and has the potential to realize itself in every moment.
I process body-material through movement research; an ongoing exploration of invisible and imaginary methods, which form dialogue with how I unearth/ re-materialize/ project my experience. For me, painting is a physical site where I compose a map, a palimpsest, a picture. The painting composition is an intervention of the movement practice. Within the intervention-period of making a painting, I alternate between inscribing gesture onto the painting surface, and reading this changing topography as a physical form of literature. Doing this allows me to suspend in a space of possibility, a space which has begun to feel like concepts of formlessness/ potential/ and the imaginary, and now I am finding form through being a participant in the world. This has brought up queries of language, its nature, and the formation of it.
Through my work, I seek to: Practice/ religion as embodiment and relationality, not indoctrinated colonial theology; Question/ pedagogy as something which projects certain ideas onto the body; Believe/ in the capacity of the body’s wisdom and memory; Create/ spaces and supports for negotiating our expressive, prolific nature; Nurture/ transformation, receptivity, and empathy.
Images and text © Sasha Cohen 2025 Inquire here