Alice Diop Makes Her Exhibition Debut With a Miu Miu Project at Art Basel Paris
French filmmaker Alice Diop has made her first move into exhibition-making with a multimedia project for Miu Miu, the Italian fashion house, at Art Basel Paris. The project, called 'Gesture of Consolation' (in French, 'Geste de Consolation'), looks at how Black women have been portrayed through history and how those images shape the present, WWD reports.
The exhibition is housed in the Palais d'Iéna in Paris, the same building where Miu Miu holds its runway shows. Art Basel, the international art fair group, lists Miu Miu as Official Partner of its Paris Public Program for a third year. Its press dossier gives the public run as 21 to 25 October 2026, and online registration for guided tours on miumiu.com opened in October.
The show combines film, photography, books, dance, music and sculpture. It opens with a self-portrait by South African photographer Zanele Muholi. A dual-screen video installation follows, made from archival images from the 19th and 20th centuries.
One room, called 'A Room of One's Own', holds a library of 500 books that Diop chose herself. The list includes works by Iceberg Slim, Raymond Carver, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Zakiya Dalila Harris.
A performance space uses chairs taken from Miu Miu's most recent fashion show. Actors read texts by Audre Lorde, Zora Neale Hurston and June Jordan there. For the first three days, the space hosts a performance adapted from 'Prophétique', a piece by Ivorian choreographer Nadia Beugré. The run closes with music from Angel Bat Dawid and her ensemble Sistazz of the Nitty-Gritty.
The exhibition grows out of earlier work. Diop selected a reading for her Carte Blanche at the 2023 Autumn Festival in Paris, and her stage piece 'The Voyage of the Black Venus' was presented at the same festival in 2025. Her film 'Fragments for Venus' was made for Miu Miu's Women's Tales series, where it was the 30th commission, and it premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Art Basel's guide says the Paris project developed from a dialogue that began with that film.
Wallpaper describes Diop as curating a celebration of Black female creativity for the project.
Art Basel says this year's fair takes over streets, gardens and historic landmarks across Paris. Miu Miu's project is one of the public events that run alongside the fair's exhibitors.
