Alice Diop on Her “Very Risky Endeavour” for Miu Miu

For Art Basel Paris, Diop ventures beyond cinema with a deeply personal exhibition presented by Miu Miu, exploring Black womanhood, creativity and the risks of laying herself bare

“I never conceived of anything like this.” The French filmmaker Alice Diop is talking of her latest work, Geste de Consolation (Gesture of Consolation) – but it isn’t a film. Rather, it is her first foray into fine art as an artist-curator with the grand expanse of Paris’ Palais d’Iéna as a kind of canvas. This development – “a very risky endeavour,” in Diop’s words – came at the behest of Miuccia Prada, whose Miu Miu is, for the third year, the Official Partner of Art Basel Paris’ public programme. At a dinner celebrating Diop’s contribution to the Miu Miu Women’s Tales film series last autumn, Prada floated the idea – and, Diop allows, Mrs Prada is a woman to whom it is hard to say no. So Diop reconsidered her practice, pushed beyond her boundaries and, essentially, bares her soul for this major project, which she herself describes as a form of creative archaeology. “I think I saw it as a self-portrait from the beginning,” she says.

In physical terms, what Diop has created is an exhibition that combines her own work and obsessions with the art of other figures, primarily Black women. There is a self-portrait by the ‘visual activist’ Zanele Muholi, the monumental five-metre-tall bronze sculpture Sentinel (Mami Wata) by Simone Leigh, and a library containing books reflective of her own collection. “Madame Bovary to Zadie Smith, to Marguerite Duras, to William Faulkner, to Virginia Woolf – listing these titles, it's hard to think of a better way to make a self-portrait of myself.” It makes you think of the famous (possibly apocryphal) Gustave Flaubert quote: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”, because this too feels like an unreeling of Diop’s mind. It also contains her first video installation, an untitled double-screen montage of film composed of early to mid-20th-century archival footage of colonial “scientific expeditions”, fetishising the bodies of Black women. The result is “a kind of intimate, visual scrapbook of all the images of Black women that haunt me,” Diop says. 

Although the exhibition expands beyond the cinematic, there is a sense of a filmmaker’s control. “I have a huge desire to control everything, I’m pretty obsessive,” Diop states. “That entire tension and reflection was something that I really thought about from the beginning, this idea of constrained or limited freedom, where you have spaces where people are really guided through. Trying to capture or direct their relationship to the work.” To do so, Diop has divided the main hall of the Palais into consecutive areas – in abstract, a rectilinear space sliced into different ‘scenes’, like a film strip. Rather than roaming freely, visitors are encouraged to sequentially move through the exhibition, a process Diop likens to a montage. “Of course, it’s different from what a filmmaker experiences – where we lock people in a theatre, and as best we can, we force them to watch something from beginning to end,” Diop says. You’re not physically locked in, but the architecture, to a degree, locks you into experiencing the exhibition Diop’s way. Lines are repeatedly blurred – between physical and filmic, between creation and curation.

The energies and emotions of the spaces shift fundamentally, jump-cutting between. It begins in the intimacy of her screening room, then the expansive and interactive library space housing her literary selections, a near-gladiatorial arena where spectators take to ranks of seats to watch live performances (including work by Ivorian choreographer Nadia Beugré and a corps of dancers, and by Chicago composer and musician Angel Bat Dawid and her ensemble, Sistazz of the Nitty-Gritty) and listen to readings from Diop’s key texts, and finally Leigh’s sculpture. Moving from reflective calm to dynamic action, then eventual serenity – the Leigh piece that presides over all is presented as a kind of shrine or altar. 

Or, in Diop’s view, like a hospital. “I found Séphora Pondi [an actor who featured in Diop’s Women’s Tales short film Fragments for Venus] crying in front of my video installation,” she says. “I just took her in my arms and I walked her down like you would take a friend to the doctor, or to a pharmacy, or to the spa, and I took her to Simone Leigh’s sculpture. I think that that trajectory, from crying in front of the video to being enveloped by the statue, is a path that I will be following all week, taking women from the video to Simone’s ‘pharmacy’, the way that an ambulance would take someone to the hospital.”

Diop described the risk-taking within this new evolution of her own practice as “flirting with the possibility of failure.” Although that’s something she also pushes through her filmmaking. “For me, that is the very motor drive of creative audacity,” she says. “At the same time, it’s really hard. Saying yes to this exhibition, where I have no idea what I was going to do … if I was more reasonable, I would have said no.” 

Geste de Consolation by Alice Diop is staged at the Palais d’Iéna, Paris, from 21–25 October 2026, presented by Miu Miu as part of Art Basel Paris’ Public Program