Copy link
Copied Link
30 BLIZZARDS.
A project by Helen Marten
Miu miu announces its presence as Art Basel Paris public program official partner 2025 with 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 announces “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 expands for the first time to include performance.
22-26 OCTOBER, 2025
11 AM – 7 PM CEST
LOCATION: PALAIS D’IÉNA - 9 PLACE D’IÉNA, 75016 PARIS
FREE ADMISSION. REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED FOR GUIDED EXHIBITION TOURS AND PANEL CONVERSATIONS.
Register now
A project by Helen Marten
Miu miu announces its presence as Art Basel Paris public program official partner 2025 with 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 announces “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 expands for the first time to include performance.
22-26 OCTOBER, 2025
11 AM – 7 PM CEST
LOCATION: PALAIS D’IÉNA - 9 PLACE D’IÉNA, 75016 PARIS
FREE ADMISSION. REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED FOR GUIDED EXHIBITION TOURS AND PANEL CONVERSATIONS.
Register now
“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.
A fixed line connects the five sculptural platforms within the linear and formal hypostyle of the Palais d’Iéna, itself a diagrammatic framing element of the work. At the center of the space, perforating the flow, sits an expanded civic scenario, a surrogate square or arcade that sets the space for a performative nexus - part theatre, part filmic prop, part auditorium. A central stage, performers navigate around this space and its choreographed potential to frame and imply, both body and material become grammar, key to spectacle and the framing of a deliberately elastic environment.
In addition, an industrial track – a moving circle, encompassing the static line – loops the entire space, never-ceasing and loaded with simple containers. As the single uniform element assigned to each character, these vessels hold the enigmatic tools or symbols deployed by the “30 Blizzards.”, a means of dramaturgical pacing and identification. The track runs slowly, but consistently – a single networked infrastructure, but one paused 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 22nd -26th 2025, with a preview on October 21st. Two separate curated conversations will take place on October 22nd.
CREDITS
Dramaturgy and direction of performative & choreographic movement: Fabio Cherstich & Helen Marten
Music and sound composition: Beatrice Dillon
Animation: Adam Sinclair
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 connects the five sculptural platforms within the linear and formal hypostyle of the Palais d’Iéna, itself a diagrammatic framing element of the work. At the center of the space, perforating the flow, sits an expanded civic scenario, a surrogate square or arcade that sets the space for a performative nexus - part theatre, part filmic prop, part auditorium. A central stage, performers navigate around this space and its choreographed potential to frame and imply, both body and material become grammar, key to spectacle and the framing of a deliberately elastic environment.
In addition, an industrial track – a moving circle, encompassing the static line – loops the entire space, never-ceasing and loaded with simple containers. As the single uniform element assigned to each character, these vessels hold the enigmatic tools or symbols deployed by the “30 Blizzards.”, a means of dramaturgical pacing and identification. The track runs slowly, but consistently – a single networked infrastructure, but one paused 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 22nd -26th 2025, with a preview on October 21st. Two separate curated conversations will take place on October 22nd.
CREDITS
Dramaturgy and direction of performative & choreographic movement: Fabio Cherstich & Helen Marten
Music and sound composition: Beatrice Dillon
Animation: Adam Sinclair
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’, have been developed. The program will feature distinguished panelists and writers, and will take place on October 22 at the Parliament of the Palais d’Iéna.
October 22 - 3 PM CEST
A specific watering: gap gardening
Forging productive gaps between image and text
In conversation with JULIET JACQUES
Panelists: Bhanu Kapil, Preti Taneja, Simone White
Ambiguity and metaphor are great gifts. They are not a wilful choosing not to be clear, but rather a kind of continual semantic stitching, jogging if you like, because they do not lay laws that suggest only binary options for understanding. How sad it would be not to probe at all angles to make meaning. Words make shapes that enable images to emerge; these pictures are rapid and subjective.
October 22 – 5.30 PM CEST
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
Words come with the great wailing power of wounding or seducing. They might arrive with enormous speed, tumbling en masse, but they act equally like nets or fences, harnessing particles of meaning into place. To have the versatility of language is to become paradoxically both light and enormously heavy as an operator of ideas.
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’, have been developed. The program will feature distinguished panelists and writers, and will take place on October 22 at the Parliament of the Palais d’Iéna.
October 22 - 3 PM CEST
A specific watering: gap gardening
Forging productive gaps between image and text
In conversation with JULIET JACQUES
Panelists: Bhanu Kapil, Preti Taneja, Simone White
Ambiguity and metaphor are great gifts. They are not a wilful choosing not to be clear, but rather a kind of continual semantic stitching, jogging if you like, because they do not lay laws that suggest only binary options for understanding. How sad it would be not to probe at all angles to make meaning. Words make shapes that enable images to emerge; these pictures are rapid and subjective.
October 22 – 5.30 PM CEST
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
Words come with the great wailing power of wounding or seducing. They might arrive with enormous speed, tumbling en masse, but they act equally like nets or fences, harnessing particles of meaning into place. To have the versatility of language is to become paradoxically both light and enormously heavy as an operator of ideas.
HELEN MARTEN
Helen Marten (1985, UK) is an artist and writer who works across sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and writing. Her work is in the public collections of the The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Tate, London; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York among many others. 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. Marten participated in the 55th and 56th Venice Biennales. She lives and works in London and is represented in London by Sadie Coles HQ and in New York by Greene Naftali.
Helen Marten (1985, UK) is an artist and writer who works across sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and writing. Her work is in the public collections of the The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Tate, London; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York among many others. 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. Marten participated in the 55th and 56th Venice Biennales. She lives and works in London and is represented in London by Sadie Coles HQ and in New York by Greene Naftali.