Alice Diop Stages 'Geste de Consolation' at Palais d'Iéna — SkimNews
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- Alice Diop is presenting "Geste de Consolation," a multipart installation at the Palais d'Iéna in Paris from 21–25 October, commissioned by Miu Miu and timed to coincide with Art Basel.
- Miu Miu is sponsoring the exhibition for the third consecutive year; Diop, who identifies as a film-maker rather than an artist, built the show scene by scene around women who "nourish" her — collaborators Marie Ndiaye, poet Robin Coste Lewis, and Chicago composer Angel Bat Dawid — alongside historical figures including Virginia Woolf.
- The exhibition opens with a Zanele Muholi image of a woman looking at herself naked in a mirror and closes with Simone Leigh's sculpture Mami Wata; Diop said Leigh "has never had a show in France," framing the inclusion as an attempt to redress that absence ahead of Leigh's 2027 London retrospective.
- Diop's 2022 feature Saint Omer — inspired by a real trial of a Senegalese woman who allowed her baby to drown — won the Silver Lion at Venice and was the first film by a Black female director submitted by France for the 2023 Academy Awards.
- Earlier in 2025, Diop contributed "Fragments for Venus" to Miu Miu's Women's Tales series, a 20-minute film that moves from Kayije Kagame contemplating paintings of Black subjects in the Louvre to a Brooklyn street centered on Séphora Pondi.
- The Palais d'Iéna installation also features a library of texts that have informed Diop's work and life and four principal scenarios spanning film, artworks, readings, music, and dance; Diop said she reads more than she watches film, calling cinema "my language."
Why it matters: The commission marks Diop's first move from cinema into a major institutional art space, and by giving Simone Leigh her first French showing, the program directly addresses a representational gap in the country's exhibition calendar rather than offering a purely symbolic gesture.
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