Alice Diop Debuts Multidisciplinary Exhibition Geste de Consolation at Art Basel Paris
French filmmaker Alice Diop is stepping outside the traditional cinema space for the first time with Geste de Consolation, a multidisciplinary exhibition opening at the Palais d’Iéna during Art Basel Paris.
The five-day presentation runs from October 21 to October 25, 2026, with a preview scheduled for October 20. Commissioned by Italian fashion house Miu Miu as the official partner of the Art Basel Paris Public Program, the project merges film, photography, sculpture, poetry, dance, and music into a single narrative framework.
Expanding Cinematic Practice Into Physical Space
The multidisciplinary project extends ideas Diop first explored in Fragments for Venus, her short film created for Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales series in 2025. The exhibition centers on representations of Black women and the ways historical images shape contemporary perception. Diop stated that her curation focuses on acts of consolation conceived by Black women artists to repair the fetishizing gaze found throughout art history.
The exhibition unfolds across four interconnected spaces inside the modernist Palais d’Iéna, which features a 60-meter-long central hall. Visitors begin the journey by encountering a photograph by South African artist Zanele Muholi depicting a woman looking at herself naked in the mirror. Diop noted that Muholi gives dignity and a voice to marginalized individuals.
Structure and Performances of the Paris Exhibition
Following the opening photograph, visitors enter Diop’s own two-screen video installation. The work pairs archival imagery with film excerpts that formed the director’s cinematic image bank, shifting between violent footage and comforting visual material. The tour then leads into Chambre à soi, a living room and library set against carpets featuring motifs by artist Mary Lee Bendolph. The library houses texts that shaped Diop’s intellectual life, including works by Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Marie NDiaye, and Zadie Smith.
At the center of the exhibition, the library transitions into a performance arena. A rotating cast of performers will read texts live. The space also features an adapted version of Ivorian choreographer Nadia Beugré’s Prophétique, performed by six dancers, alongside music from Chicago composer Angel Bat Dawid and her ensemble Sistazz of the Nitty-Gritty.
The exhibition concludes with Simone Leigh’s monumental bronze sculpture, Sentinel (Mami Wata). Standing nearly five meters tall and encircled by a serpent, the elongated female figure represents diasporic West African spirituality. Diop pointed out that while Leigh is a recognized figure in the United States ahead of a major London retrospective in 2027, the artist has never previously had a show in France, making this installation an effort to redress that absence.
This marks the third year Miu Miu has sponsored a major exhibition at the Palais d’Iéna for Art Basel Paris, following projects by Goshka Macuga and Elvira Dyangani Ose in 2024, and Helen Marten in 2025. Diop approaches the venue’s architecture much like a film edit, where images, sounds, and bodies accumulate meaning through sequence and proximity.