Posted By: Sorbet
Alice Diop centers her first exhibition 'Geste de Consolation' on "acts of consolation conceived by Black women artists" at Art Basel Paris 2026 with Miu Miu.
Courtesy of Miu Miu
Miu Miu has made a habit of handing over the keys to the Palais d’Iéna. Since 2024, the Maison has been Art Basel Paris’s Public Program Official Partner, first with Goshka Macuga’s Tales & Tellers followed by Helen Marten’s 30 Blizzards, always in the same concrete hall that hosts its runway shows. This year, the keys were bestowed upon a filmmaker that well and truly deserved it. You may know Alice Diop from her film Fragments of Venus, the 30th instalment of Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales that happened last year. From there, Miuccia Prada invited her to carry her pondering abilities off the screen and into Art Basel Paris. For Diop, whose Saint Omer won her the Lion of the Future award in Venice, this was a first exhibition, and a natural step for a director who has always asked who gets to look and who gets looked at, and how. Now she could build the room they look in.
Courtesy of Miu Miu
Courtesy of Miu Miu
The route began with a singular photograph by South African artist Zanele Muholi, the same image that closes Fragments of Venus as if the film’s last word became the exhibitions first. To Alice, Muholi’s self-portrait is a symbol of an underground revolution, this striking image of the artist inquiring through the circular mirror set the tone for what was to follow. Next came Alice’s two-screen video installation, a montage of the violent images and film excerpts that shaped her filmmaking gaze beside the ones that consoled her, putting the wound and the balm side by side.
Courtesy of Miu Miu
Then came Chambre à soi, a living room and library laid across a richly colored carpet carrying a motif by Mary Lee Bendolph, one of the Gee’s Bend quilters whose Alabama quilts got women’s domestic craft into permanent collections of multiple art museums around North America. And on the shelves of the library, a curated selection of books that shaped Diop’s intellect, from Madame Bovary to Zadie Smith, open to all, so the library worked as a portrait of Black women thinking in the 21st Century.
Courtesy of Miu Miu
At the library’s heart, the books began to speak. The space gave way to a performance arena where a rotating cast, including Penda Diouf, Alice Da Luz Gomes and Latifa Laabissi, read aloud from texts in the exhibition, speaking life into the words and experiences of the writers. Nadia Beugré’s Prophétique and Angel Bat Dawid’s performance with her ensemble Sistazz of the Nitty-Gritty further filled the space with movement and music as audiences looked on.
Courtesy of Miu Miu
Courtesy of Miu Miu
At the end, the gaze came back. Simone Leigh’s nearly five-meter bronze Sentinel (Mami Wata) watched over the whole space, her elongated female form encircled by a serpent, a West African water spirit with both destructive and creative powers. It’s a fitting last image of a silent guardian towering above the visitors. Simone won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, the same year Alice took her Lion of the Future, so the two artists share more than a room. Miu Miu supplied the stage and Art Basel Paris the public platform, but the story belonged to Diop, who described the whole thing as a journey of remembrance and repair.
Courtesy of Miu Miu
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