Miles Greenberg premiers Le Miroir, his first work in the MENA region

“I love that we’re just like this huge skyscraper with just birds flying around in it,” Miles Greenberg quips as his multi-channel film Le Miroir slowly plays behind us, premiering for the first time in Dubai.

Le Miroir is a two-act body of work Miles first staged live in Marrakech during the 2025 1-54 Art Fair in Marrakesh. Exploring movement, endurance, human duality, and emotional transformation, the piece’s second act was shortly filmed in the UAE desert. Both acts will merge as one film, on view at ICD Brookfield Place until May 18.

“The piece really developed into an Orpheus and Eurydice kind of narrative. I wanted these two central figures to be lovers who are looking for each other in the afterlife,” Miles shares on the narrative of Le Miroir, noting that the Marrakesh iteration was the piece’s ‘funeral’ with the UAE’s desert landscapes providing the backdrop for its ‘afterlife.’ “It’s a romance, some kind of a love story; finding each other and saving each other from the brink of something.”

Making and showing work for the first time in the MENA region, the New York-based artist was initially “seduced by this ‘blade-runner esque’ kind of myth” to Dubai; its “hyper-ambitious architecture on the edge of this vast emptiness.” In parallel, Miles immediately fell in love with the stoic courtyards and reflective pools in the outdoor basins of Marrakesh’s El Badi Palace. “It felt suspended in time; very poetic, very ritualistic. I thought it would be an interesting proposition to find some liminal space between the ancient world and this hyper-modern world.”

48 hours after his six-hour performance of Le Miroir Act I in El Badi Palace, Miles and his co-star JeanPaul Paula headed to Dubai to film Act II. “It didn’t feel like the Marrakesh performance quite ended. The intermission was the airplane.”

Through the journey, ICD Brookfield Place’s Director for Art and Events, and curator of the exhibit, Malak Abu Qaoud witnessed Mile’s process of crafting the piece, working hand-in-hand with the artist as they commissioned the project. “It was so incredible to seeing how the artwork progressed, from the initial discussion with Miles and filming in El Badi Palace, to flying to Dubai a day later, and storyboarding in the middle of the desert at night, there’s definitely a lot more passion in this project as we were making something pivotal and transformative.”

Miles describes the desert as one of the very few places that have touched him intensely. “I’ve never been in a desert like that before. We entered the dunes and it was a portal into another universe. Dunes are this incredibly powerful thing that the earth does. I feel like our brains are almost not really equipped to fully process.” Act II goes on to become the artist’s response to the vastness, emptiness, and liminality he felt filming in the desert for over 12 hours.

But creating work outdoors is not inherent to Miles’ practice; he actually tends to deviate from them, “unless it’s for a very good reason”. He sees his practice as beyond the body and its movement but rooted in the artist’s meticulous crafting and thinking of the space, the “matrix the body lives in”.

“I’ve never performed outside before. The last time I performed outside, I was 17, in a parking lot in Montreal. So much of what I do is my thinking around space: the lighting, culture, dynamics of the [environment] and architecture of a ritual space. The movement and the body is the last thing I think about; obviously it’s the centre de la raison, but the bulk of the work that I do is the substrate. You don’t have that level of precision with outdoor work. There’s so much unknown when you’re outside.”

“El Badi Palace is a once in a lifetime opportunity and the desert is this incredible place that I’ve always wanted to interact with,” allowing Le Miroir to be an exception to his rule. “But [being outdoors] brought a lot of additional turmoil. I could never have anticipated how big nature was going to play into this.” 

Unbeknownst to the audience in Marrakesh, Miles and JeanPaul’s movements were born out of survival needs than a product of rehearsed choreography. The first two hours of the performance was for conduction of warmth, with the remaining four hours a bodily generation of shade and cover from the intense sun.

Beyond exploration of new environments, Le Miroir was a challenge for the artist to explore not just creating narrative work, but also using film as a medium. “I wanted to make something that was a lot more cinematic. On some different planes, some alternate planes of reality, somewhere totally else, that felt very far.” 

“Something was in the water that day when I was making these images: it really felt like a movie. I came up with the most narrative piece I feel like I’ve ever made. I also wanted to weave my own mythologies into it, find my own poetry and romance, in a way that felt cohesive or respectful to history. As a black person, I can say that this is also a continent that has a lot to do with us. I was from a place of very deep reverence.”

Looking to the forms and mediums of Alejandro Jodorowski, David Lynch, Jean Cocteau, Andrei Tarkovsky, Miles felt that he can be fearless enough to call this work a film. “They were the grandfathers that I was looking towards when I was creating this cinematic framework that was more responsive, fluid, less rigid.”

Inspired by Andrey Tarkovsky’s 1975 film The Mirror, Miles developed this piece to feel ‘deeply intuitive and personal’. “You roll and you see what comes out. I figured out what this piece was through the editing process…I feel like I’ve used editing as a language more than I ever have before.”

“I feel I’m [in Dubai] here as a director,” he shares candidly. “Even though I’m doing a [durational] performance to create a cohesive installation, this piece performs more than I ever will. I’m actually more excited for after the live performance ends and people can really see this piece of cinema. I wanna see this thing perform on its own.”

Le Miroir is commissioned by the ICD Brookfield Place Arts Programme in Dubai and first presented at 1-54, the second iteration was filmed in the UAE desert and culminates in a multi-channel film. The work premiered at ICD Brookfield Place on 15 April, accompanied by a one-time live performance by the artist, curated by Malak Abu Qaoud.