Alice Diop: Geste de Consolation

Miu Miu invites 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 and the setting for Miu Miu’s runway shows.

Diop’s first foray into exhibition-making, Geste de Consolation extends her cinematic vision beyond the screen into a narrative space, bringing together film, photography, sculpture, poetry, dance, music and performance as a montage of encounters and emotions. In doing so, the exhibition continues Miuccia Prada’s lifelong engagement with the ways in which cinema and art inspire one another, while opening a new chapter in Miu Miu’s exploration of women’s lives: their experiences, histories and hidden stories.

Geste de Consolation focuses on a question that runs throughout Diop’s body of work as a filmmaker, unfolding here through a multimedia scenography. The exhibition becomes a celebratory chorus of Black creativity, united around the ways in which looking has been shaped by the very representations it confronts — representations that continue to haunt and shape the present.

Diop brings together women artists who, in her words, “have healed me, who have nourished me”, inviting visitors on a journey through four interconnected spaces, each organised around a different discipline, voice and architectural atmosphere.