Alice Diop to Take on Miu Miu’s 2026 Art Basel Paris Commission

Miu Miu has announced that the recipient of its 2026 commission for the Art Basel Paris Public Program will be filmmaker Alice Diop.

Diop will stage Geste de Consolation (Gesture of Consolation) at both the Palais d’Iéna headquarters of France’s Economic, Social and Environmental Council and the Miu Miu runway show. Diop’s takeover will mark the third commissioned by Miu Miu during Art Basel Paris, with Goshka Macuga’s Tales and Tellers (2024) and Helen Marten’s 30 Blizzards. (2025) preceding it.

Diop was invited by Miu Miu founder and ARTnews Top 200 Collector Miuccia Prada to make Geste de Consolation as a continuation of the artist’s 2025 short film Fragments for Venus (part of Miu Miu’s “Women’s Tales” series); that work looks at the representation of Black women historically and today.  

Diop is best known for her documentaries looking at French society, including La Permanence (On Call, 2016), which looked at refugees being treated at a hospital in a banlieue northeast of Paris, and Nous (We, 2020), which focused on the mostly Black and immigrant communities living in the banlieues off the RER B line. (The latter film screened at the Museum of Modern Art in 2021.)

Her first feature film, Saint Omer, first screened at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, winning the Grand Jury Prize and the Luigi De Laurentiis Award for a debut film. The film is also Diop’s first narrative film, taking the court case of Fabienne Kabou, a Senegalese French woman who was ultimately convicted of murder for drowning her child, as inspiration. Diop attended Kabou’s trial as part of her research.

“I believe that by writing it I was creating a distance with the subject of this matter that was so corrosive, so difficult,” she told the New York Times in 2023. She “realized in the writing process that she needed another character whose reaction to Laurence could highlight the themes of maternal ambivalence she wanted to explore,” per the Times.

Geste de Consolation will mark Diop’s first foray into exhibition making, bringing together her work with that of others. Upon entering the space, visitors will first see a photograph by Zanele Muholi before coming across a two-channel film installation by Diop, which will collage together excerpts from her films and pieces of her archives, showing what has “shaped her gaze as a filmmaker through disturbing violent images and those that have consoled her,” according to a release.

The exhibition will also include a section called Chambre à soi (A room of one’s own), which will be decorated by textiles of Gee’s Bend quilter Mary Lee Bendolph and filled with books by the likes of Zora Neale Hurston, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Zadie Smith.

During the run of the show, October 21–25 (with a preview on October 20), a cast of performers will read from the text. The Chambre à soi will also serve as the setting for an adaption of choreographer Nadia Beugré’s Prophétique. Upon exiting, visitors will come across Simone Leigh’s 16-foot-tall bronze Sentinel (Mami Wata).

“Diop conceives of Geste de Consolation itself as a form of montage, with the guided path moving from one part of the exhibition to another functioning like a film edit moves from one shot to the next,” a release reads. “The visitor’s experience accumulates meaning through proximity and sequence rather than direct explanation, leading ultimately to cathartic release. Every placement—sound, word, voice, image—is composed for the body moving through it. Geste de Consolation offers a scenographic journey of remembrance and repair.”