PARIS.- Helen Marten's major new work, 30 Blizzards., will be presented by Miu Miu this October as a part of its ongoing partnership with Art Basel Paris as Public Program Official Partner. Echoing the complexity, depth and meaning of her practice, shifting between mediums of sculpture, painting, drawing, video and writing, Marten expands for the first time to include performance. The project will be staged at the Palais d’Iéna, headquarters of France’s Economic, Social and Environmental Council from 22-26 October 2025.
30 Blizzards. explores a cross-section of different disciplines, the interrelationship between distinct and divergent mediums when placed in proximate dialogue. The exhibition is physically structured around a new counterpoint between five sculptures, and five newly conceived videos. Each obliquely references a chronological moment of life, from childhood to older age, experiential detail through successional chapters: childhood, community, sexuality, interiority, loss. The paired relationships give framework to five different monologues, with the voice of each video forming a crucial narrative punctuation within the wider, more amorphous libretto structure of the performance.
The title 30 Blizzards. derives from thirty characters – thirty performers – each instilled with their own temperament, their unique, emotional weather. They inhabit the space interchangeably with song and speech. In numerology, 30 is the number that often symbolises infinity; 30 is also the embodiment of the time cycle – a clock of 360 degrees, divided into 12 sectors. Blizzards. becomes simultaneously a metaphorical reference to the inherent barometer of human emotion and interaction as a meteorological condition, but also an onomatopoeic term, that speaks to performative frenzy.
In a choreographed performance conceived in close collaboration with theatre and opera director Fabio Cherstich, and sound and music composed by Beatrice Dillon, the figures within the space do not play characters in the conventional sense, but rather embody structures, functions or trajectories. Each are named and themed from diverse points of influence: weather systems, animals, archetypal characters, others termed with pure gesture or feeling, expressive of lyrical or social intent. Their linguistic and textual outbursts place them mutually as singular entity and collaborative group, a literary palette of narrative fluctuation. Each are uniquely equipped with a material symbol – a “tool” – with every character occupying a permeable space between language and image, musicality and text.
Born in Macclesfield, UK, 1985, Helen Marten is an artist and writer who works across sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and writing. Alluding to language, systems, and experiences, Marten investigates how we exist within and re-translate the world around us. She has held numerous solo exhibitions throughout the world and her work is in the public collections of the The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Tate, London; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, among many others. In 2020 her debut novel, The Boiled in Between was published by Prototype. She is currently working on a book of unruly non-fiction, Broken Villas, essays embracing conceptual drift and archival photography as metaphor. Her collected critical and theoretical writings on art, Mud Physics, is forthcoming with Sternberg Press. She studied at Central Saint Martins, London and the University of Oxford. In 2016, Marten was awarded the Tate Turner Prize and was the inaugural recipient of the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture; she won the LUMA Award in 2012 and the Prix Lafayette in 2011. Marten participated in the 55th and 56th Venice Biennales and the 20th Biennale of Sydney. She lives and works in London. Marten is represented in London by Sadie Coles HQ and in New York by Greene Naftali.
