Miu Miu’s Collaboration With Helen Marten Is the Highlight of Art Basel Paris

There’s a lot to take in here in Marten’s latest work, a project presented by Miu Miu in its capacity as the official sponsor of Art Basel Paris’s public program. Developed in collaboration with Italian theater and opera director Fabio Cherstich and British composer and electronic music producer Beatrice Dillon, it’s perhaps best approached as a conceptually, narratively, and spatially fragmented opera. It is, after all, centered on a libretto penned by Marten; there are characters, there is song, there is a stage.

Listening to these characters’ extemporisations, seeing them holding curious props and weaving around the vast installation, you’re struck by a sense of depth and texture that’s tough to place. “There are 30 forms, each occupying either an archetype, a physical character, a weather character, or an animalistic character,” Marten explains. “They’re almost like atomized slivers of a world that we recognize, but can’t necessarily geographically locate. There’s something that everyone can relate to.” The Builder, The Fox, The Mother; Magic, The Baker, The Dog: each is its own “blizzard,” a simmering vignette of human experience and temperament. Each also carries their own prop, plucked from gray plastic crates that circulate on the track—whimsical concrete metaphors for their character’s spirit. For The Dentist, black leather gloves; for The Dog, several pink balls.

Photo: Courtesy of Miu Miu

Photo: Courtesy of Miu Miu

Astoundingly—especially in light of the work’s dizzying scope and complexity—30 Blizzards. marks the first time that Marten is working with performance. While she’s long harbored ambitions of writing text to be sung, the step was prompted by an invitation from the Fondazione Prada, with the performance component as a stipulation of the commission. “It was a very wide remit,” the artist says. Then again, while the introduction of thinking, feeling bodies into her precisely articulated universe of objects is new, it’s a pretty natural development of her practice. “Paradoxically, so much in my work speaks of the relationship to the body—to the hand, to the mouth—through language,” she says.

Indeed, language—and specifically writing—has always been at the core of Marten’s work; The Boiled in Between, her 2021 novel, is testament to that. But her drawings, paintings, and sculptural works have also long been underpinned by systematic logics that are analogues of how verbal languages convey meaning. Objects and images are arranged according to formal grammars, rules that are simultaneously adhered to and defiantly broken to give form to thought and feeling.