Miu Miu Presents Alice Diop’s First Exhibition at Art Basel Paris: “Gesture of Consolation”

Miu Miu, in its third year as official partner of Art Basel Paris’s public program, brought French filmmaker Alice Diop’s first exhibition as a visual artist, “Gesture of Consolation” (Geste de Consolation), to audiences at Paris’s historic Palais d’Iéna as a free exhibition-performance program. Open from October 21 to 25, the project took shape after Miuccia Prada proposed the idea last autumn at a dinner celebrating Diop’s contribution to the Miu Miu Women’s Tales film series.

A Space Built Like a Film

Mirroring Diop’s own cinematic sensibility, the exhibition unfolds in sequential chapters: a screening room, a reading area built from her personal library (Flaubert, Zadie Smith, Marguerite Duras, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf), and an arena-like space for live performance. Diop’s first video installation presents a two-screen montage of archival footage from mid-20th-century colonial “scientific expeditions.” At the program’s final stop, Simone Leigh’s five-metre bronze sculpture “Sentinel (Mami Wata)” stands like an altar, while a self-portrait by Zanele Muholi also features in the space.

The performance program includes Ivorian choreographer Nadia Beugré and her dance company, Chicago-based composer Angel Bat Dawid with Sistazz of the Nitty-Gritty, and actress Séphora Pondi. Diop says she “never conceived of anything like this,” calling the exhibition “a kind of intimate, visual scrapbook of all the images of Black women that haunt me,” and describing the undertaking as “a very risky endeavour.”