A continuous twenty-four-hour screening of Miles Greenberg’s performance Oysterknife (2020) will be presented at Tjarnarbíó from October 22 – October 23, 2021. Oysterknife was first presented by the Marina Abramović Institute and is co-produced by the Phi Centre in Montreal. In this durational work, Greenberg walked on a conveyor belt for twenty-four consecutive hours without interruption. It was the artist’s most austere and demanding exploration of ritual. Epic in its endurance, introspection and athleticism, the performance is a meditation on the physical and mental limitations of the body, creating space for unmediated automatic movement.
Miles Greenberg (b. 1997 in Montreal, Canada) is a performance artist and researcher of corporal movement based in New York. His work consists of large- scale, sensorially-immersive and often site-specific environments which revolve around the physical body in space. These installations are activated with durational performances, treating the body as a sculptural material.
At age seventeen, Greenberg left formal education and threw himself into a four-year independent research project studying movement and architecture as they relate to the Black body. This spanned a number of solo artistic/research including École Jacques Lecoq and Musée du Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Red Gate Gallery Beijing and Long Island’s Watermill Center. He has a largely self-acquired background in linguistics, perfumery, butoh and physical theatre, and has studied under the direction of various mentors such as Edouard Lock, Robert Wilson and Marina Abramović.
