Alice Diop’s route through the Palais d’Iéna

The Palais d’Iéna is familiar to fashion audiences as a Miu Miu show venue. This week, Alice Diop puts that same architecture to a different use. Her Geste de Consolation, commissioned by Miu Miu for Art Basel Paris, leads visitors through four connected spaces rather than presenting a collection of objects to be viewed in any order.

A photograph by Zanele Muholi begins the route. Diop’s two-screen installation follows, cutting between archival material and film. Visitors then move into Chambre à soi, a library laid out over carpets bearing a motif by Mary Lee Bendolph. Readings, dance and music occupy the next space; Simone Leigh’s bronze Sentinel (Mami Wata) closes the sequence. The arrangement borrows something from Diop’s work in cinema: what comes before changes how the next image is seen.

The project follows Fragments for Venus, Diop’s 2025 film for Miu Miu Women’s Tales, and returns to questions of how Black women have been represented. The exhibition opens to the public at the Palais d’Iéna on 21 October and runs until 25 October 2026. Admission is free, 10am–7pm.