NEW LENS: Acclaimed French director Alice Diop will stage her first exhibition in October as part of Miu Miu’s ongoing partnership with Art Basel Paris.

“Geste de Consolation,” or “Gesture of Consolation” in English, will build on the short film Diop presented at the Venice Film Festival last year as part of the Miu Miu Women’s Tales series. Titled “Fragments for Venus,” it examined the representation of Black women in Western art, and how it continues to reverberate today.

The show, to take place at the Palais d’Iena in Paris — where Miu Miu traditionally holds its runway shows — will bring together film, photography, sculpture, poetry, dance, music and performance across four spaces, the brand said in a statement.

“I want my curation to center on acts of consolation conceived by Black women artists, each active in their own discipline, to repair the fetishizing gaze to which centuries of art history have confined us,” Diop said.

The filmmaker, whose work addresses topics such as identity, migration and colonialism, has curated a selection of works by artists including Zanele Muholi, Mary Lee Bendolph and Simone Leigh.

One room will feature a video installation screening a montage of archival images and film excerpts that have shaped Diop’s gaze. Another will feature a library of her favorite books.

A central stage will host readings of texts by the likes of Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Marie NDiaye and Zadie Smith, as well as concerts and dance performances.

The exhibition will conclude with Leigh’s monumental bronze sculpture “Sentinel (Mami Wata)” representing an elongated female form encircled by a serpent, inspired by a powerful West African water spirit.


Diop won the award for best documentary film at the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival for “We,” and the Silver Lion in Venice in 2022 for her feature film debut “Saint Omer.” She was invited to become a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2024.

The director is currently working on a loose adaptation of “Phantom Africa” by Michel Leiris, a classic of French literature and anthropology, and regularly teaches at NYU, Yale, Harvard and Sorbonne University, among others.

“Geste de Consolation” will be open to the public from Oct. 21 to 25. Online registration for exhibition guided tours will be available on miumiu.com from Oct. 8. Miu Miu has been the public program official partner of Art Basel Paris since 2024.