The fashion brand Miu Miu is picking up the pace with its art collaborations this year with its latest exhibition, 30 Blizzards, on the Turner Prize-winning artist Helen Marten, making waves during Art Basel Paris.
Free of charge, 30 Blizzards is taking place in the monumental Palais d’Iéna in the French capital, and comprises installation, video and performance in a five-channel work that is activated at intervals by 30 performers. The theatre director Fabio Cherstich, who previously worked on Miu Miu’s exhibition Tales and Tellers with Goshka Macuga, has returned to stage Marten’s work. A combination of speech and song, the exhibition gives voice to “complex but universal tropes” of the child, the carer, the lover, the patient and the widow, according to a statement.
Helen Marten’s exhibition 30 Blizzards, commissioned by Miu Miu Images: courtesy of Miu Miu
In this vast installation Marten has created a universe that expands on her practice, building on her film work and bringing in performance and music. Characters, or “archetypes”—including the Fox, the Mother, the Snail and the Dog Walker—circulate through an installation made up of sculpture, kinetic work and film gathering periodically on a central stage.
“The invitation was very broad and very generous, but explicitly [needed] to include a performative element,” Marten says. “It sort of defied all of the conventional gallery or museum invitations that I usually receive, and I’ve never made a performance before so, it very much began with writing. I wrote the libretto, designed to both be built into five monologues for five videos, and sung positions, choral positions, active positions and narrator positions.”
Video still of Child, Child (2025) Image: courtesy by Helen Marten
The videos depict unpopulated spaces narrated by characters who splinter off into performances breaking down barriers between the work and the public space it sits in. The libretto was put to music by the composer Beatrice Dillon who composed all the music for the work.
The performance aspect of this commission has been an “incredibly exciting” departure for Marten. “The literal figuration of bodies in this space has always been the missing element from the work. Much of the sculptural work or the gestural work of the paintings or the drawings implies the existence of a body, but that body is never present. Likewise, with the videos, there are sort of ruinous but maybe recognisable domestic environments, but they’re never populated with explicit figuration. In this case, to hear text delivered by live, resonant bodies is incredibly exciting.”
Miu Miu’s sister company, Prada, is also finding solid ground in the art world. Its long-running private club Prada Mode featured an installation by the Danish-Norwegian contemporary art duo, Elmgreen & Dragset, titled The Audience, during the Frieze art fair in London last week.