HELEN MARTEN

Each of the five new films of This Weather references an underlying sequence of symbolic roles from youth to older age, detailed through successional chapters: childhood, community, sexuality, interiority, loss. Five distinct monologues form crucial narrative threads, all instilled with their own temperament, a unique, emotional weather. These monologues are voiced by women, but they are not literal representations, rather they mark a space for metaphor, translation and plurality. The “mother”, for instance, speaks suggestively to an atmosphere of care, but the symbolism is never explicit, and the implications might be those of chosen family or empowerment through reciprocal dialogue and exchange. The voice of the child has a buoyant naivety, but also a hint of violence or the sense of potential rupture that accompanies abstract play or chance. The patient speaks of analytical self-reflection and the absurd comedy of solipsistic “diagnosis”. The widow maintains a powerful position of futurity rather than ultimate grief; and the lover is an elastic cipher, a character whose subjects of intimacy are the granular quality of the material world, in friction with deliberate libidinal affirmation. Concrete identity is irrelevant to an ideology of more generalized and radical human optimism.

Marten’s video scripts extend outwards to draft a fully “molecular” universe: animals, weather, material conditions, existential emotions, and narrative archetypes, with the great vastness of physical space held in juxtaposition to the similar vastness of psychic space. The intensive figurative linkage between voiced text and material tactility suggests that the empirical architecture of the built world is continually held against the thickness of desire and visibility.

This Weather becomes a meta-model of the larger world, a fragmented system of interlocking lenses of criticality, domesticity and importance: the world, inside the world, inside the world. Each is character defiant and intent, like a little planet dropping its own singular crumbs.

The work is made with animation by Adam Sinclair, and with sound and composition by Beatrice Dillon. The monologue actors are, in order of appearance, Laura Green, Vanessa Onwuemezi, Eve Esfandiari-Denney, Sophia Al-Maria and Kathryn Hunter.

Born in Macclesfield, UK in 1985, Helen Marten is an artist and writer who works across sculpture, painting, drawing, video and writing. She studied at Central Saint Martins and University of Oxford, and lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Treatise of a Coat, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2025); Evidence of Theatre, Greene Naftali, New York (2023); Third Moment Profile | The Almost Horse, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2022); Sparrows On the Stone, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2021); and Therefore, An Ogre, Greene Naftali, New York (2021). Marten received the Lafayette Prize in 2011, the LUMA Award in 2012, and The Turner Prize and Hepworth Prize for Sculpture, both 2016. In September 2021, LUMA Arles unveiled Day Light Songs (biting the air), a significant new permanent commission by Marten. Marten participated in the 55th and 56th Venice Biennales, and her work is held in numerous public collections including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, London; The British Museum, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, among many others. In autumn 2020, her first novel, The Boiled in Between, was published by Prototype to wide acclaim. She is currently at work on her second novel, A Polite History of Vandalism, and a book of unruly essays on containers, Broken Villas. Her newest book, Mud Physics: Theoretical Writings, will be published by Sternberg Press (Institut für Kunstkritik) in Spring 2026, a collection of critical and theoretical writing considering the gaps between image and language, and conceptual ideas including approximation, models, collage and inlay, dust, vectors, animals, snow, blood and diagram. For the Art Basel Paris 2025 public art programme, Miu Miu debuted a major new performance-based opera commission by Marten titled 30 Blizzards. at Palais d’Iéna.

Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ.