Last year, Miles Greenberg created “Oysterknife”, a durational piece where he spent 24 hours walking, non-stop, on a treadmill. The only stop made was during 25 minutes, around the 16th hour, due to temporary loss of consciousness. “Oysterknife” is a declaration of love by the Canadian artist, who lives between New York and Paris, to 1970s performance art, particularly the great names of black resistance, Senga Nengudi, Pope. L and David Hammons.

BoCA presents, for the first time to the Portuguese public, Miles Greenberg, a young artist who works between performance and sculpture, in the tradition of Marina Abramovic, with whom he has collaborated for a long time, specialising in durational performance and the creation of sculptural forms that defy the limits of physical resistance and express an unromanticised view of the black queer body.

In 2019, during an artistic residency at Palais de Tokyo (Paris), he created “Alphaville Noir”, in experimentation with Godard’s futuristic film “Alphaville” (1965), which occurs over 12 hours in a single night. “Alphaville Noir” marks the start of Greenberg’s use of the performance method “Didactic Opera”, based on movement forms of black culture, such as voodoo rituals, and the Japanese dance Butoh.

“Water in a Heatwave” is a new durational piece for eight performers and is the artist’s most challenging project so far, in terms of scale and duration. In pairs, the performers clash their bodies into each other atop a series of pedestals, creating numerous tensions within the space.