Conceived at the invitation of Miuccia Prada and Miu Miu, 30 Blizzards. is a multidisciplinary work by the artist Helen Marten. In an echo of the complexity, depth and meaning of her practice, shifting between mediums of sculpture, painting, drawing, video, performance and writing – staged at the Palais d’Iéna, Paris – open to public from 22-26 October 2025 as part of Art Basel Paris, Public Program Official partner.
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. 30 Blizzards. is held by it – by the possibility for classical, lyrical narrative; by the grammatical pleasure of language for its shapes and feel; by instruction and terming; by poetry; by the diptych qualities of image within language, and all the feasible spaces of interpretation in between.
At its most provocative, writing tends the gaps and cracks, allowing new possibilities to take root. In Rosemarie Waldrop’s “gap gardening”: the spaces between words where meaning stays open to emergence. Inspired by this concept, two conversations for 30 Blizzards., titled ‘Pleasure Image, Pleasure Text’, have been developed. Curated by Helen Marten the program will feature distinguished panelists and writers and will take place on October 22nd at the parliament of the Palais d’Iéna.
Writing is the shared ground of these talks: not only a medium, but an affinity that connects diverse artistic visions and social positions. All speakers approach language as a force that resists fixed categories and power’s enclosures, while also generating new constellations of meaning through political probing, human analysis, metaphor, and translation. In a digital world of structural commands and erasures, the act of returning to language—making meaning—becomes a way to rediscover possibility, and freedom.
Online registration for panel conversations (and guided tours for the exhibition)
available on miumiu.com
Pleasure Image, Pleasure Text
Program of conversations
October 22nd, 3pm and 5.30pm
A specific watering: gap gardening1
Forging productive gaps between image and text
Bhanu Kapil / Preti Taneja / Simone White
In conversation with: Juliet Jacques
October 22nd, 3pm
Imagine the various intersections of voice that stem from positions of social compromise – gender, sexuality, class, race, ability – and imagine further how the realms of fact from these different positions shift via the notion of lived experience. To imagine poetry and criticism as opposing categories is a certain kind of strangeness, but in wider social terms, that assertion might often be the case. What is considered empirical fact is often dangerously made concrete by certain positions of power, by finance, by influence, by geography. The horror vs. freedom complex of language is enormously messy. When it works, what might be electric about artmaking or writing is that the definitions open themselves with deep and gracious optimism – so much lends itself to the nuance of rediscovery. 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. That is where excitement lies, after all – in the articulation of a pause, or the space of an enigmatic gap between definition, that is watered to allow something new to grow forth. When our geographies, our politics, our people are dissolving into the terrifyingly possessed world of the digital and its structural commands, perhaps it is simply radical to re-engage with matter, not the violence of erasure, but instead language, over, and over.
Glyphic Apparitions and the lost planet: what falls to dust ever returns
Language-ing the body, or material as social and emotional metaphor
Rachel Allen / Nuar Alsadir / Vanessa Onwuemezi
In conversation with: Juliet Jacques
October 22nd, 5.30pm
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. We learn words as children in a certain kind of objective collectable way, like they are small portions of becoming familiar with the world that can be carried carefully in pockets and brought out as pictorial cards with underwritten image-significance when the option of dialogue or pronouncement or emotion presents itself. To have the versatility of language is to become paradoxically both light and enormously heavy as an operator of ideas. There is nothing more special than the privilege of thinking and rearrangement, but the more you know, the more you truly don’t and vice versa. Language ignites in the most incendiary ways, for good and for bad, and that unmooring is particularly special, because it suggests a new way through – a means of arriving as an already-loaded cultural human but with further possibilities. In the sense of capital purchase, speech doesn’t cost a thing, yet its capacity for generating wide worlds of aggregate material quality, of interpretation, politics, honesty, metaphor, feeling is vast and gymnastic. Of course, this is not a naive imagining that free speech has no price, but written text permits a structural space of conceptual organisation to emerge, and within that diagrammed space of information or suggestion, there is subtext, translation, escalation, collage. The permission for a this or that understanding of meaning is not ambiguous or unedited, or undecided, but rather a beautiful and an intensely powerful way to continue probing at meaning because it is never dead: it is active and ever magic, ever possible. We make models of the world that understand how dust caught in the light is simply another exponential compression of matter’s vastness, of one inner world coinciding positively with external reality. This is not hubris but optimism, and perhaps pleasure is the fundamental itch.
1Gap Gardening is an expression and title of writer Rosemarie Waldrop, her phrasing of how to conceptualise zones of transformation