For its 2026 commission as Art Basel Paris Public Program Official Partner, Miu Miu has invited French filmmaker Alice Diop to conceive Geste de Consolation (Gesture of Consolation), a major project at the Palais d’Iéna headquarters of France’s Economic, Social and Environmental Council - as well as the site of the Miu Miu runway shows. Conceived at the invitation of Miuccia Prada, Geste de Consolation furthers the dialogue begun with “Fragments for Venus”, Diop’s 2025 film for Miu Miu Women’s Tales, further developing its exploration of how Black women have been represented and how those representations remain contemporary stakes. Diop’s very first foray into exhibition-making extends her cinematic vision beyond the screen into narrativized space, bringing together film, photography, sculpture, poetry, dance, music and performance as a montage of encounters and emotions. In doing so, Geste de Consolation continues Miuccia Prada’s lifelong engagement in how cinema and art inspire each other and also opens a new chapter in Miu Miu’s fascination with the lives of women: their experiences, their histories and their hidden stories.

Geste de Consolation focuses on a single question running through Diop’s whole body of work as a filmmaker, unfolding it here as multimedia scenography. “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. Geste de Consolation becomes a celebratory chorus of Black creativity united around how looking has been formed by the very representations it confronts, representations that still haunt and shape the present moment.

Diop gathers women who “have healed me, who have nourished me,” into a journey across four interconnected spaces, each organized around a different discipline, voice and architectural atmosphere.

The itinerary begins with a photograph by South African artist Zanele Muholi. Beyond it, Alice Diop’s two-screen video installation features a montage of archival images and film excerpts that have shaped her gaze as a filmmaker through disturbing violent images and those that have consoled her. From this cinematic chamber, visitors enter Chambre à soi (a room of one’s own), a living room and library spread across a patchwork of richly colored carpets featuring a motif by artist Mary Lee Bendolph. A domestic space within the Palais d’Iéna’s monumental concrete structure. This vast library, open to all, makes available the books that have shaped Diop’s intellectual life, but on a wider scale, creates a portrait of a Black woman thinking in the 21st century. Chambre à soi is a space for viewers to dream, create, and build a vision of emancipation. At the center of the exhibition, the welcoming space of the library gives way to a performance arena. Texts by Penda Diouf, Zora Neale Hurston, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Marie Ndiaye, Zadie Smith, and others are read out live by a rotating cast of performers, including Penda Diouf, Alice Da Luz Gomes, Latifa Laabissi, Séphora Pondi, Davide-Christelle Sanvee, and Betty Tchomanga.

The stage also hosts an adapted version of Ivorian choreographer Nadia Beugré’s Prophétique, performed by six dancers, followed by performances from Chicago composer and musician Angel Bat Dawid with her ensemble, Sistazz of the Nitty-Gritty. The journey ends with a passage onto Simone Leigh’s monumental bronze Sentinel (Mami Wata) . Standing nearly five meters tall, its elongated female form is encircled by a serpent. This sculpture is Leigh’s interpretation of a powerful West African water spirit whose image has travelled and transformed across Africa and its diasporas. Possessing both destructive and creative-generative powers, Mami Wata becomes an ambiguous guardian: monumental and silent, watching over the entire space.