Opening in May, Helen Marten presents This Weather, a film in five chapters, at Sadie Coles HQ. Originally conceived as part of Marten’s ambitious opera performance,30 Blizzards., presented by Miu Miu at Palais d’Iéna for Art Basel Paris in October 2025, This Weather is restaged here as a singular work.
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.
