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In January, the New York-based performance artist and sculptor Miles Greenberg flew to the UAE to film the second act of Le Miroir, a durational performance piece commissioned by the ICD Brookfield Place Arts Programme. He had no idea where he was headed, what the landscape would look like when he got there, and how it would impact him emotionally.
“I was put into a car and told this was the best place to go. So, to be honest with you, I just went with it,” he says with a laugh. “I got into a vehicle at about 3:30 am and drove to somewhere relatively close to the border of Oman. It was surreal. It was fabulous. The last time I remember my brain being shocked by a geography – so radically taken out of its comfort zone – was when I saw a volcano erupt in Iceland.”
It was there, in the desert, that he and his performers filmed for hours, with the second iteration expanding on the artist’s exploration of movement, endurance, and emotional transformation. A work of two acts, Le Miroir’s first act was staged live during the 2025 edition of the 1-54 Art Fair in Marrakech’s historic El Badi Palace. At ICD Brookfield Place in Dubai on 15 April, both acts will come together as a single piece.
“Act one and act two are superimposed in the edit into a single work, and they’re going to be playing on six simultaneous channels,” explains Greenberg, whose work focuses on large-scale, site-specific environments that engage the senses and explore the physical body’s relationship to space. “If act one is a funeral, then act two is the afterlife. So rather than being consecutive to one another, they’re operating as parallel planes.”
A multi-channel film and durational performance, the live performance in Marrakech was six consecutive hours. The desert shoot was closer to 10 or 12. The editing process, which Greenberg is halfway through, will take roughly 100 hours.
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Born in Montreal, Greenberg first became interested in performance art as a child. He had a profound relationship with sculpture, especially Greek and Roman statuary, and found little interest in traditional forms of theatre. Then, when he was 12, his mother took him to Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present, a durational performance piece held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During its three-month run, Abramović sat in a chair, locking eyes with visitors, who could sit silently with the artist for a duration of their choosing.
“It set into motion the idea that my body could accomplish that which I was so intuitively drawn towards in the museums I grew up in,” says Greenberg, who quit formal education at the age of 17. “I guess that’s how performance began – as an impulse. But ultimately, the end goal was always to be a sculptor. And I’ve always been a sculptor from day one. Whether I’m sculpting in flesh or in marble or in bronze has become incidental to me over the years.”
This love of sculpture extended to Andrei Tarkovsky’s semi-autobiographical film Mirror, a 1975 meditation on memory, time, and the emotional landscape of the past. The film affected Greenberg deeply as a teenager, especially the director’s perspective and editing style, which shaped the film like a sculpture or singular entity. It would go on to inspire Le Miroir, as would Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, which famously featured mirrors as portals to the underworld.
“I love experimenting with different artistic media and seeing what resonates with the community," says Malak Abu-Qaoud, curator of ICD Brookfield Place Arts in Dubai. “Performance art is still in its early stages in the region; it’s something that needs to be explored further. And bringing Miles Greenberg to the UAE was the perfect opportunity to broaden this medium's experience and appreciation.” Abu-Qaoud first came across Greenberg’s work – his performance piece, Sebastian, curated by Klaus Bisenbach and Lisa Botti – at the 2024 Venice Biennale. “It is one of the most powerful performances I’ve ever seen,” she says. “He works with his body as the canvas and working with him to develop Le Miroir was one of the most beautiful experiences.”
By bringing Greenberg’s work out of the formal context of a gallery, museum or theatre and placing it in the public realm is part of ICD Brookfield Place Arts’ mandate of making creativity accessible. “We bring people from all walks of life together in one space, creating a diverse and layered ecosystem,” explains Abu-Qaoud. “We offer something collaborative, communal, and non-traditional, resulting in a true interdisciplinary melding of interests and specialties with exciting outcomes.” Le Miroir, the programme’s latest offering, certainly fits the bill.
During the live performance at ICD Brookfield Place, Greenberg will seek to evoke an emotional response through a singular, minimal physical action, building on the visual language he developed during the pandemic. Because it is extremely difficult to choreograph eight, 12 or 24 hours of performance, movement is often incidental to form for Greenberg, who tells both himself and his performers to achieve a certain shape.
“I never think much about movement, it’s incidental,” Greenberg explains. “My work has way more to do with finding forms, and the ways those forms deteriorate over time. That’s the movement; it’s just involuntary decay. The discrepancy between how a material starts off and where it ends up in its life cycle is what speaks the most to me. How the cookie crumbles. And that’s my favourite part about using the body as a sculptural material: you see the changes happening before your eyes. The body changes after a few hours, and stone changes over a few centuries, but it’s one and the same.”
Le Miroir will run until 18 May, although the live performance will be a one-off.
“What I want to talk about the most are the things we don’t have language for,” he says. “When making a work, I’m often thinking about reaching a state of mind, a state of being, a state of body, a state of spirit, where you induce a particular emotional frequency, whether that’s something that you would typically encounter in a panic attack or a fit of ecstasy – states that we experience as humans that are typically very short-lived.”
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“There’s not a lot we’re equipped to handle physiologically as humans. There are limits. I often think of Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin, who describes his epileptic seizure as his body short-circuiting as a result of its inability to contain the sublime ecstasy of his spirit. I’m thinking about certain things that the body limits us from in day-to-day life, but I’m really drawn to preserving – almost like catching a butterfly in a jar; placing an artefact under a glass case; preserving an organism in formaldehyde, putting it in a petri dish and seeing how it can proliferate. I want to bottle lightning.”
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