Alice Diop's Miu Miu Installation Opens at Paris Art Basel — SkimNews
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- Alice Diop debuts Geste de Consolation (Gesture of Consolation), a five-day multipart installation of film, artworks, readings, music and dance at the Palais d'Iéna in Paris from 21–25 October, timed to Art Basel.
- Miu Miu commissioned Diop for the fashion house's third annual Palais d'Iéna exhibition; the 2024 edition by Polish artist Goshka Macuga featured a mechanical conveyor belt and roughly 100 actors.
- The installation opens with a Zanele Muholi image of a woman looking at herself naked in a mirror and closes with Simone Leigh's towering sculpture Mami Wata — Diop called the Leigh inclusion "an attempt to redress" the fact that the artist behind a major 2027 London retrospective has never had a show in France.
- Collaborators include writer Marie Ndiaye, American poet Robin Coste Lewis, Chicagoan composer Angel Bat Dawid, and historical figures such as Virginia Woolf — "women who nourish me," Diop said, adding she reads more than she watches film and is "a frustrated writer."
- Diop's courtroom drama Saint Omer won the Silver Lion at Venice in 2022 and became the first feature by a Black female director submitted by France for the Academy Awards.
- Diop's 2025 Miu Miu Women's Tales short Fragments for Venus starred Kayije Kagame staring at paintings of Black subjects in the Louvre before shifting to a Brooklyn street centered on Séphora Pondi.
Why it matters: Miu Miu is using its Palais d'Iéna platform to give French audiences their first Simone Leigh exhibition, a gap Diop explicitly named in the source. A film-maker who resists the "artist" label is curating the women who've shaped her work, reframing fashion-house patronage as a storyteller's tribute rather than a conventional gallery show.
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