French filmmaker Alice Diop is moving beyond cinema for the first time with Geste de Consolation (Gesture of Consolation), a major new multidisciplinary project opening at the Palais d’Iéna during Art Basel Paris 2026.
Commissioned by Miu Miu as Official Partner of the Art Basel Paris Public Program, the project brings together film, photography, sculpture, poetry, dance, music and live performance, extending Diop’s cinematic practice into physical space.
The exhibition develops ideas first explored in Fragments for Venus, Diop’s 2025 film for Miu Miu Women’s Tales, looking at representations of Black women and the ways those images continue to shape how women are seen today.
For Diop, the starting point is consolation — and specifically the work of Black women artists whose practices have offered her something personally.
“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 says.
The exhibition unfolds through four interconnected spaces, beginning with a photograph by South African artist Zanele Muholi before moving into Diop’s own two-screen video installation. The work combines archival imagery with film excerpts that have shaped her gaze as a filmmaker — moving between disturbing and violent images and those she describes as having consoled her.
From there, visitors enter Chambre à soi (a room of one’s own), a living room and library installed across richly coloured carpets featuring a motif by artist Mary Lee Bendolph. Set against the monumental concrete architecture of the Palais d’Iéna, the library contains books that have shaped Diop’s intellectual life, creating what she describes more broadly as a portrait of a Black woman thinking in the 21st century.
At the centre of the exhibition, the library gives way to a performance arena where texts by writers including Zora Neale Hurston, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Marie NDiaye and Zadie Smith will be read live by a rotating cast of performers.
The space will also host an adapted version of Ivorian choreographer Nadia Beugré’s Prophétique, performed by six dancers, alongside performances from Chicago composer and musician Angel Bat Dawid and her ensemble Sistazz of the Nitty-Gritty.
The journey ends with Simone Leigh’s monumental bronze Sentinel (Mami Wata). Standing almost five metres tall, the elongated female figure is encircled by a serpent and draws on Mami Wata, the powerful water spirit whose imagery has travelled and transformed across Africa and its diasporas. Here, Leigh’s sculpture becomes an ambiguous guardian watching over the exhibition.
Diop has approached the architecture much as she might approach a film. The movement from one space to another operates like an edit, with images, words, sounds and bodies accumulating meaning through their sequence and proximity rather than through straightforward explanation.
Spectatorship itself becomes part of the installation. Tiered seating encourages visitors to watch Diop’s images, the performers and each other before finally encountering Leigh’s Sentinel — turning the act of looking into part of an exhibition concerned precisely with who has historically been looked at, and how.
Born in 1979, Diop is one of the leading figures in contemporary French cinema. Her films include Saint Omer (2022), Nous (2021) and Vers la Tendresse (2016), with her work addressing identity, migration and colonialism and bringing lives often pushed to the margins into the centre of the frame.
Geste de Consolation continues Miu Miu’s series of projects at the Palais d’Iéna during Art Basel Paris, following Goshka Macuga and Elvira Dyangani Ose’s Tales & Tellers in 2024 and Helen Marten’s 30 Blizzards. in 2025.
Alice Diop: Geste de Consolation (Gesture of Consolation), 21st–25th October 2026, Palais d’Iéna, Paris. Preview 20th October. Part of the Art Basel Paris Public Program. Free.
