Art

Helen Marten’s 30 Blizzards at Art Basel Paris

Explore Helen Marten’s 30 Blizzards at Art Basel Paris — where luxury, performance and sculpture converge in a bold new cultural alliance.

Por: Angela Leon Cervera
Helen Marten
30 Blizzards. A monumental new performance-installation by Helen Marten. Photo: @artbasel

When the British artist Helen Marten opens the doors to her new work, 30 Blizzards, at Art Basel Paris in partnership with Miu Miu, we witness a convergence of high culture, performance and symbolic capital. Marten’s practice, long rooted in material complexity and conceptual rigour, stages itself in the heart of luxury fashion and global art market machinery.

 

This collaboration is anything but incidental. It signals that luxury brands are no longer mere patrons; they are co-creators in the production of culture. In this moment of art-fashion synergy, 30 Blizzards becomes a telling case study in how an artist, a brand and a global fair negotiate the boundaries between spectacle and critique.

Helen Marten
30 Blizzards. A monumental new performance-installation by Helen Marten. Photo: @artbasel

How does Helen Marten’s practice set the stage for 30 Blizzards?

Marten, born in 1985 in the UK, trained at Central Saint Martins and the Ruskin School of Fine Art at the University of Oxford. Her trajectory soared when she won the Turner Prize and the inaugural Hepworth Prize for Sculpture in 2016.


Her work is distinguished by the assemblage of objects — coins, shoe-soles, chalk, eggs — stripped of their everyday roles and re-imagined as agents in a discourse about materiality, form and meaning.


Language and structure play key roles: Marten interrogates how words collapse into visual excess, how form becomes system, how material resists recognition.

 

In 30 Blizzards, these elements escalate. For the first time in her practice, Marten incorporates live performance, writes a libretto, designs an immersive architectural staging, and chairs a cast of thirty characters embodied as “emotional weathers.” The scale — a 200-metre long set where audience and performers intermingle — signals that Marten is not simply making objects but orchestrating environments.

Helen Marten
30 Blizzards. A monumental new performance-installation by Helen Marten. Photo: @artbasel
Helen Marten
30 Blizzards. A monumental new performance-installation by Helen Marten. Photo: @artbasel

What does the collaboration with Miu Miu and Art Basel Paris reveal about luxury and cultural production?

The Italian fashion house Miu Miu, part of the Prada group and steered by Miuccia Prada, has long nurtured a narrative around femininity, experimentation and subversion. Its engagement with the arts goes beyond logo-placement; the brand takes on projects like Women’s Tales in film and now commissions ambitious works such as 30 Blizzards.

 

By sponsoring and co-producing Marten’s project at the Palais d’Iéna for Art Basel Paris, Miu Miu asserts cultural legitimacy: luxury becomes cultural facilitator, not just product.


Meanwhile, Art Basel Paris positions its “Public Programme” off-site projects as more than market fairs. The choice to stage 30 Blizzards in a monumental institutional space emphasises experience, immersion and cross-disciplinary reach.

 

This triadic alliance encapsulates a shift: the boundaries between high fashion, fine art and commercial spectacle are blurring. The brand lends resources and cultural clout, the artist expands her medium and scale, and the fair offers the venue and visibility. The result is a project that is simultaneously luxury activation, conceptual art event and market spectacle.

Why does 30 Blizzards mark a turning point in performance-sculptural practice under luxury patronage?

Firstly, the scale and hybridity of the work: 30 Blizzards synthesises sculpture, video, live performance and architecture. Marten deploys five new sculptures, five video works, thirty performers each with a distinct “emotional climate”, and a track of moving containers telling narrative and material storylines. 


Secondly, the positioning of the audience inside the work: the stage/space is 200 metres long, and viewers will move among the performers. Marten’s description of the characters as embodying “structures, functions or trajectories” rather than roles, dissolves the spectator-object/artist-object binary. 


Thirdly, the luxury-brand partnership adds complex symbolism: a fashion house funding a project that questions materiality, speed, style and surface. Marten’s interest in how “we are seduced by shine and speed” finds irony and tension in this collaboration. 


In sum, 30 Blizzards uses the resources of luxury and market platforms to stage a conceptual critique of materiality, identity and experience. It suggests that large-scale performance-sculptural work in the contemporary moment requires the same infrastructural muscle once reserved for blockbuster exhibitions or theatre productions.

Helen Marten
30 Blizzards. A monumental new performance-installation by Helen Marten. Photo: @artbasel

With 30 Blizzards, Helen Marten steps boldly into a new register of cultural production: the confluence of sculptural inquiry, live performance and luxury-brand patronage. Her collaboration with Miu Miu at Art Basel Paris signals a shift in how we understand the boundaries of art, fashion and market spectacle. The result is an experience that invites reflection on materiality, language and identity, framed within the grandeur of a luxury-inflected platform.

 

As we witness this convergence, the question becomes less about which realm the work belongs to, and more about how artists, brands and institutions configure new modes of cultural encounter. 30 Blizzards is a vivid example of what’s possible when the generator of meaning is not just the gallery wall or the runway, but the immersive stage in between.

FAQ: Questions You Might Be Asking

  • What is 30 Blizzards exactly? It is a major new project by Helen Marten presented at the Palais d’Iéna as part of Art Basel Paris’s Public Programme (22-26 October 2025). It includes sculpture, video and live performance commissioned in partnership with Miu Miu.
  • Who are the collaborators? Marten wrote the libretto and designed the staging; Fabio Cherstich directed the performative and choreographic movement; Beatrice Dillon composed the music and sound.
  • How does fashion figure into this work? The luxury brand Miu Miu is the official partner of the Public Programme and thus co-produces the work. This collaboration embeds the project within the luxury-art nexus.
  • Why is Art Basel Paris important here? As the Paris edition of the global Art Basel fairs, the event is expanding via its Public Programme into large-scale, off-site immersive projects — signalling a move beyond pure sales into cultural experience.
  • Where can we see 30 Blizzards and is it accessible? The work is staged at the Palais d’Iéna in Paris from 22 to 26 October 2025. According to the presenting materials, admission is free, though registration may be required.

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