Why Miu Miu handed its Art Basel Paris exhibition to a filmmaker
This week Miu Miu gave its Art Basel Paris slot to the French filmmaker Alice Diop, who built her first exhibition at the Palais d’Iéna: a double-screen film, a library, live performances and a five-metre bronze by Simone Leigh. The subject is how Black women have been shown in art and film, and what an artist can do to repair that. Here is what is inside, room by room.
What this is
Geste de Consolation (Gesture of Consolation) is Alice Diop’s first exhibition and the first time she has worked as a curator. It is scheduled from 21 to 25 October 2026 at the Palais d’Iéna in Paris, which houses France’s Economic, Social and Environmental Council and is where Miu Miu holds its runway shows. Entry is free. It is part of the Art Basel Paris public programme, which Miu Miu has sponsored since 2024.
The idea came from Miuccia Prada. At a dinner last autumn celebrating Diop’s film Fragments for Venus, the 30th film in Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales series, Prada suggested an exhibition. Diop told ANOTHER it was “a very risky endeavour” and that a more cautious person would have refused.
Room by room
Visitors move through the Palais d’Iéna in a set order, like scenes in a film. Diop says she likes to control everything, and she wanted people guided in sequence. The route starts in a screening room. It opens with a self-portrait by the South African artist Zanele Muholi, followed by Diop’s first video installation. It has two screens and combines early to mid-20th-century archive footage of colonial “scientific expeditions” that fetishised Black women’s bodies with film excerpts chosen to console. The second room is Chambre à soi, a living room and library open to all. The books come from Diop’s own collection and include Madame Bovary, and works by Zadie Smith, Marguerite Duras, William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. The décor is inspired by a motif of the artist Mary Lee Bendolph. The third space is a performance arena with tiered seating. Texts by Penda Diouf, Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Marie NDiaye and Zadie Smith are read aloud there. The Ivorian choreographer Nadia Beugré presents her piece Prophetic with dancers, and the Chicago composer Angel Bat Dawid performs with her ensemble Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty. The route ends with Sentinel (Mami Wata), a bronze by Simone Leigh of almost five metres, set up like a shrine.ё
A hospital, not a gallery
Diop compares the route to a hospital. She told ANOTHER that she found the actress Séphora Pondi, who appeared in Fragments for Venus, crying in front of the video installation. She took her by the arm, as you would take a friend to a doctor, and walked her to Leigh’s sculpture. Diop says she plans to follow that path all week, moving visitors from the film to the sculpture. She describes the whole exhibition as a self-portrait made from the images and books that shaped her. Her aim, she told Hypebeast, is acts of consolation by Black women artists, “to repair the fetishizing gaze.”
The programme
According to Sortiraparis, readings take place daily at 11:00, 13:00, 15:00 and 17:00, with a performance at 18:00. Beugré’s Prophetic is scheduled on 21, 22 and 23 October, and Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty on 24 and 25 October. Readers and performers include Séphora Pondi, Latifa Laabissi, Penda Diouf, Davide Christelle Sanvee, Alice Da Luz and Betty Tchomanga. Guided tours were booked on Miu Miu’s website.
Why collectors should look at it
Muholi, Leigh and Bendolph are artists whose names appear in the exhibition’s own descriptions as the starting points of Diop’s thinking, so the show works as a short list to look up. It is also the third Miu Miu exhibition at the fair, after Tales & Tellers by Goshka Macuga and Elvira Dyangani Ose in 2024 and 30 Blizzards by Helen Marten in 2025. Each was free and led by an artist or curator.
