Alice Diop Takes Over Palais d'Iéna for Miu Miu's "Geste de Consolation" During Art Basel Paris Week

Running from 21 to 25 October 2026 at the Palais d'Iéna in Paris, filmmaker Alice Diop's "Geste de Consolation" occupies the hall designed by Auguste Perret, staged at the invitation of Miuccia Prada and her label Miu Miu. Diop rejects the exhibition label, describing the project as a personal emotional and intellectual map, a self-portrait intended as an act of consolation. Entry is free. A Zanele Muholi self-portrait, made in 1972, greets visitors at the entrance, its gaze meeting the viewer through a mirror. A short film of roughly ten minutes, shown across two screens, sets colonial-era archival images against questions of how Black women's bodies were animalized and fetishized. A "room of one's own," named for Virginia Woolf's essay, holds Diop's ideal library: James Baldwin beside Nobel laureates Doris Lessing and Olga Tokarczuk, volumes on Faith Ringgold and Alice Neel, Adèle Haenel's "Viser juste" and Pat Parker's "La révolution n'est ni propre, ni jolie, ni rapide," and Michel Leiris's "L'Afrique fantôme," which will inform Diop's next film. Readings and performances by Latifa Laabissi and Séphora Pondi animate an arena-like space guarded by Simone Leigh's bronze "Sentinel," made in 1968 and drawing on the water deity Mami Wata. The project follows Diop's 2025 Venice Mostra short "Fragments for Venus," part of Miu Miu's "Women's Tales" program and inspired by a poem from the American writer Robin Coste Lewis. Diop's "Saint Omer" dates to 2022.