Dynamic duo Daniel Buren and Miles Greenberg at Reiffers Initiatives for Art Basel Paris

By Félix Touzalin.

A Reiffers Initiatives exhibition that opens a dialogue between Daniel Buren and Miles Greenberg

To mark the fifth anniversary of its Mentorship program, Reiffers Initiatives presents the expected, yet fascinating duo Daniel Buren and Miles Greenberg, Mentor and Young Talent of 2025. On paper, everything seems to set them apart – generation, visual language, relationship to the body.

From this constructive tension, fuelled both by friction and mutual admiration, emerges a hybrid exhibition spread over two floors. Downstairs, Greenberg’s visceral, performative world and upstairs, under the glass roof, Buren’s geometric, light-filled touch. Two realms that refuse to merge, but instead respond to each other from a distance.

A shared space

One might have expected their encounter to unfold in the realm of performance. After all, Daniel Buren had explored performance, not only as a medium but also through the set protocols he now applies when creating and producing in situ works. A field that Miles Greenberg, a performer at heart, could have chosen to engage with to question his own rituals. But that wasn’t the case. Although they don’t share the same approach to the body, what they do have in common is the obsession with space… Not as a backdrop, but as a place for sensory experience.

For Buren, this exploration takes two shapes. Outside, La Façade aux Acacias dresses the façade of the Reiffers Initiatives building in a graphic interplay visible from the street. Upstairs, Nouvelles images du ciel, an in situ work on the glass roof, reinvents the perception of light. As for Greenberg, he takes over the ground floor with Solaris, an installation combining incense, earth, puddles, and cast aluminum sculptures set on double plinths.

From performance to sculpture

A performance by his friend, singer-songwriter Yseult, will activate the installation. It will extending his critical fascination with Solaris (1961), the novel by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, and Tarkovsky’s film adaptation, in which the first anthropomorphic manifestation created by an extraterrestrial intelligence is a Black woman.

Greenberg’s experience of the body unfolds in a soft darkness, echoing a line by poet Aimé Césaire: “We will not hand the world to the assassins of dawn.” Two worlds clash and echo one another. First, Plato’s cave, where knowledge is shaped through contrast, through shadow. Then, Buren’s cathedral, where dazzling light becomes a form of spiritual revelation upstairs.

These are Miles Greenberg’s first sculptures. What stands out immediately is how deeply infused they are in a performative backstage world. Up until now, performance  used to be the core of his practice. A form of experimentation in which he stages his body as both a living and sculptural entity, capable of inhabiting a space according to principles of proportion, movement, and interaction with the audience.

From his earliest performances, one could already sense a attempt at building sculpturesque bodies. The postures he adopted – often dramatic and exaggerated – evoked the baroque tradition of great Italian sculptors like Gian Lorenzo Bernini, where dramatic tension meets formal beauty, or the expressive bodies of some Mannerist sculptors. Each pose is designed to create a heightened sense of expressive sophistication.

To preserve or dematerialise? When colonialism faces itself

The mirror is a motif shared by the two artists. In Greenberg’s work, it lies on the ground beneath the sculpture. A mirrored pedestal that reflects the piece back onto its surroundings and questions the very authority of the pedestal.

It is a way for the artist of playing with the porous boundary between artwork and monument, along with all the respectability, memory, and rigidity that a monument implies. Greenberg specifically engages with this ambivalence – elevating and deifying the object, while simultaneously dematerializing the pedestal that sanctifies it.

“Daniel Buren and Miles Greenberg.” 2025 Mentorship exhibition, from October 24th to December 13th, 2025, at Reiffers Initiatives, 30 rue des Acacias, Paris 17th.