30 BLIZZARDS.
A project by Helen Marten

22-26 OCTOBER, 2025
11 AM – 7 PM CEST
LOCATION: PALAIS D’IÉNA 9 PLACE D’IÉNA, 75016 PARIS

FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO PUBLIC.

Miu Miu was the official partner of the Art Basel Paris public program 2025, presenting a new project, 30 Blizzards., by Helen Marten.

Miuccia Prada’s Miu Miu constantly reflects her core practice, of engaging with stories of femininity and women’s lives and histories, reflecting these concepts through multilayered explorations across fashion and culture. As part of its ongoing partnership with Art Basel Paris as Public Program Official Partner, Miu Miu presented 30 Blizzards., a major work conceived by artist Helen Marten. Echoing the complexity, depth, and meaning of her practice, shifting between mediums of sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and writing, Marten, for the first time, expanded her work to include performance.

30 Blizzards. explored a cross-section of disciplines and the interrelationship between distinct and divergent mediums when placed in proximate dialogue. The exhibition was physically structured around a new counterpoint between five sculptures and five newly conceived videos. Each work obliquely referenced a chronological moment in life—childhood, community, sexuality, interiority, and loss—tracing experiential detail through a series of successional chapters. These paired relationships provided a framework for five distinct monologues, with the voice of each video serving as a crucial narrative punctuation within the broader, 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.

A fixed line connected the five sculptural platforms within the linear and formal hypostyle of the Palais d’Iéna, which itself acted as a diagrammatic framing element for the work. At the center of the space, interrupting the flow, was an expanded civic scenario—a surrogate square or arcade—that established the setting for a performative nexus: part theatre, part filmic prop, part auditorium. Around a central stage, performers navigated the space and its choreographed potential to frame and imply; both body and material became grammar—integral to the spectacle and to the construction of a deliberately elastic environment.

In addition, an industrial track—a moving circle encompassing the static line—looped the entire space, never ceasing, and loaded with simple containers. As the single uniform element assigned to each character, these vessels held the enigmatic tools or symbols deployed by 30 Blizzards., serving as a means of dramaturgical pacing and identification. The track moved slowly but steadily—a singular networked infrastructure, occasionally interrupted by the tender interactions of human intent.

30 Blizzards. is part of Art Basel Paris’s Public Program and staged at the Palais d’Iéna, Paris. The project is open to the public from October 22 to 26, 2025. Two curated conversations took place on October 22.

Pleasure Image, Pleasure Text
PROGRAM OF CONVERSATIONS

For Helen Marten, language belongs to and within everything. In her practice, writing is not a secondary gesture but a productive syntax that shapes and sustains the work. Inspired by this concept, two conversations for 30 Blizzards., titled ‘Pleasure Image, Pleasure Text’, were developed and presented as part of the program. Featuring distinguished panelists and writers, the event took place on October 22 at the Parliament of the Palais d’Iéna.

October 22, 2025
A specific watering: gap gardening
Forging productive gaps between image and text
In conversation with JULIET JACQUES
Panelists: Bhanu Kapil, Preti Taneja, Simone White

October 22, 2025
Glyphic Apparitions and the lost planet: what falls to dust ever returns
Language-ing the body, or material as social and emotional metaphor
In conversation with JULIET JACQUES
Panelists: Rachel Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Vanessa Onwuemezi