The French filmmaker makes her first foray into exhibition-making, bringing together Black women artists across art, literature and performance at Art Basel Paris.

PARIS — French filmmaker Alice Diop made her first foray into exhibition-making with a multimedia project for Miu Miu at this year’s edition of Art Basel Paris, exploring how Black women have been represented throughout history and how those images continue to shape the present.

Titled “Gesture of Consolation,” the exhibition brings together film, photography, books, dance, music and sculpture inside the Palais d’Iéna, the Paris venue that also hosts Miu Miu’s runway shows.

The exhibition expands on a reading she selected for her Carte Blanche at the Autumn Festival in Paris in 2023, as well as the stage work “The Voyage of the Black Venus,” presented at the same festival in 2025.

It also builds upon “Fragments for Venus,” Diop’s project for Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales film series, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year.

The extraordinary exhibition unfolds in scenes, beginning with a self-portrait by South African photographer Zanele Muholi, followed by a dual-screen video installation featuring archival images from the 19th and 20th centuries. They trace the history of representation of Black women, including the violence and objectification that have shaped their portrayal in photography and film.

For Diop, the installation’s progression reflects how her own creative perspective began to take shape. “It’s an entire journey,” she told WWD. “Everything is in dialogue; everything resonates with and relates to everything else.”

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