STOWE, Vt. — On three adjoining screens, a warrior coated in black oil and dressed only in dark briefs slowly and ceremonially brings her double-edged sword against that of another fighter. The opponent recoils, sword arm extended and blade held out to fend her off. Gripping her weapon with her bare left hand, the warrior presses forward, while her adversary drops to her knees still clutching her own sword like a talisman, a shield, or a plea for peace. As the aggressor withdraws, murky crimson water rises around both women’s legs, while six other similarly armed performers circle them, their skin covered in a dark lubricant so thoroughly that only their palms, the insides of their ears, or their bright teeth interrupt the obsidian effect.
Even their usually white eye sclera appear dark, thanks to contact lenses, making them seem like figures from another world carrying out a ritual whose meaning remains unclear. The scene comes from “TЯUTH,” Miles Greenberg’s three-channel video installation in his solo exhibition at the Current in Stowe, Vermont. The 15-minute work condenses a seven-hour durational performance presented in 2023 at Powerhouse Arts in Brooklyn, New York. Although the performers, all Black, execute dramatic cuts and parries, the movement is carefully rehearsed and not meant to inflict injury.
Greenberg confirmed as much through the Current’s curator and executive director, Rachel Moore, noting that the swords are steel with dulled edges. Still, the footage is visually striking. Most of the exchanges involve two combatants, but one sequence shows several fighters trying to subdue a single warrior, heightening the sense of peril even if harm seems unlikely. One of the work’s most compelling moments comes when Greenberg, who is also a performer, drags the flat of his sword across his tongue, transferring the black pigment to his mouth as he smiles knowingly at the camera.
That image calls to mind Friedrich Nietzsche’s argument in On the Genealogy of Morality that the human animal was once unpredictable and untamed, rather than bound by normalized behavior. He contends that custom, law, and punishment made people calculable, even as their underlying nature remained chaotic. In the adjoining gallery, another video work more forcefully evokes that same sense of wild, incalculable vitality.
“LE MIROIR,” the exhibition’s second and final work, is presented as a six-channel video on six monitors arranged in a circle. It combines an edited recording of a 2025 performance at Marrakesh’s historic El Badi Palace for the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair with footage shot in the Emirati desert on the border with Oman. Ten performers, again coated in black pigment and at times dressed in black athletic wear, stand on mirrored plinths or sit in a calm pool of water, their reflective bases transforming the surrounding landscape while they hold sculptural, statuesque poses.
Here, their sclera and irises appear entirely white, again giving them the look of beings practicing a kind of magic. They are accompanied by local animals that may serve as familiars, including piebald pythons and white storks. At one point, a lone man sits on a mirrored disc in a modified lotus position while a python coils around his bare neck, chest, and shoulders. Much of the piece follows Greenberg and another man in a sequence of physical play — walking hand in hand, tumbling together down a desert dune, and carrying one another on their backs.
The Current describes the work as “a surreal queer love story inspired by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice,” a reading that feels plausible, though perhaps a little too exact for what Greenberg ultimately presents.
