Alice Diop’s Exhibition With Miu Miu Is An Act Of Consolation For Black Women Across History

While the parameters of what defines an artist are subjective, many would assert that French filmmaker Alice Diop more than meets whichever criteria you were to set. Known for a cinematic perspective conditioned by profound empathy, socio-critical acuity and a stirring poetic sensibility, her films – such as her Silver Lion-winning breakthrough Saint Omer (2022) – centre the experiences of lives typically consigned to the margins; Black women in particular, “attesting to the violence with which the collective imagination has confined us,” she says. Essentially, her work emotes, provokes and prompts reflection in ways that most good commentary-driven art does. Still, “artist” is not a term that she readily applies to herself. “As I see it, I’m nothing but a filmmaker,” is her immediate response when I ask about her experience of broadening the remit of her output beyond the screen and into the realm of a physical exhibition.

This is the very reason for our conversation – which takes place at the Palais d’Iéna in Paris, the Rationalist landmark you’re more likely to recognise as the biannual home of Miu Miu’s fashion shows. Since 2024, it’s also housed an annual interdisciplinary installation as part of the brand’s official partnership with Art Basel Paris on its public programme. Following in the footsteps of Goshka Macuga and Helen Marten, Diop stages Geste de Consolation, an ambitious special project – and her first foray into exhibition-making – conceived at the invitation of Miuccia Prada.

While donning an artist-curator cap had never been an ambition that Diop harboured, she says, it was her “admiration for the vision, audacity and authority” of Mrs Prada that convinced her otherwise – not to mention her being “a woman to whom it is clearly hard to say no.” The invitation came off the back of a prior collaboration between Diop and Miu Miu; namely, Fragments for Venus, the 2025 short she created for its storied Women’s Tales film programme. A poetic meditation on the available representations of Black women across art history and their impact on real-life perspectives, the film was born of research she’d conducted during a year spent teaching at Harvard after the release of Saint Omer. “It was really a period of tremendous inspiration for me. It enabled me to discover works and texts and ways of thinking that I didn’t necessarily have access to in France,” she recalls. Among her most formative discoveries was Voyage of the Sable Venus, an experimental work by the American poet Robin Coste Lewis, which “composed a list of titles of art objects, including the presence of Black women bodies throughout art history, from antiquity to the present day.”

Now, Geste de Consolation materialises as an intuitive development of Diop’s research, unfurling across photography, film, literature, spoken word, theatre, performance, dance and sculpture. Curated in collaboration with Francesca Corona and Mehdi Meklat, the exhibition opens with a self-portrait of Zanele Muholi – the esteemed South African photographer – lying nude on a bed, the majority of her body obscured by a large mirror she holds, her gaze trained squarely on her own reflection. It then progresses into a curtain-cloistered chamber containing a two-channel video installation by Diop herself: an arresting montage largely comprising archival material that the filmmaker has been amassing for years that highlights the violent objectification and fetishisation of Black women’s bodies through the gaze of colonial-era ethnographers and anthropologists.

Next, Chambre à soi (A Room of one’s Own), an interactive installation comprising “an almost identical replica of my office, and some of the volumes that make up my personal library”. Think: novels by Zadie Smith, Marie NDiaye and Maryse Condé; artist books by (or on) Liz Johnson Artur, Arthur Jafa, Kara Walker, Félix González-Torres and Martine Syms; and writings on cinema by Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras. As a collection, they amount to a generous, intimate portrait of Diop as a creative and thinker, with visitors invited to linger and learn from texts and images that have been instrumental in shaping her perspective.

A performance arena, framed by riser seating (which also flanks the aforementioned library space) hosts readings from a number of the volumes contained on its shelves; a rambunctious dance-theatre piece by Ivorian choreographer Nadia Beugré, which sees a group of queer and trans performers of colour flit between voguing to high-tempo coupé decalé and viscerally id-driven performances; and free jazz recitals by composer, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Angel Bat Dawid and Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty, an all-women spontaneous composition collective. Presiding over the colonaded hall, Sentinel (Mami Wata), a monumental bronze sculpture by revered American artist Simone Leigh, her interpretation of the pan-African creator-destroyer water deity keeping watch over the space.

“In this exhibition, what I was looking for consolation from is how we Black women have been looked at in art history,” she says, reciting Robin Coste Lewis’s poem. “It was in reading that that I understood how my gaze and how I saw myself had been constructed from this terrible violence that was subjected to the way that we are seen. I think that my decision to become a filmmaker, not entirely consciously at the time, was to repair and provide consolation for that gaze. Here, I’ve gathered all these women artists, who are working towards cleaning us of this perspective, and providing a different way of seeing us, not only now, but for centuries to come.”

Interestingly, Diop initially had no intention of including her own works in the show, choosing to “protect myself by saying that I was going to be nothing but a curator, asking other women artists to offer me their gestures of consolation,” she says. Just three months ago, however, “I realised that it was impossible for me not to be among them.”

Poring over the repository of essentialising, animalising footage she’d amassed from colonial archives, she resolved to isolate each instance of a Black woman’s appearance, “cutting them all together, composing in the way that I would imagine you make a piece of free jazz, based purely on my emotions,” she says. “I didn’t want to reproduce the pornography of the original images; to look at them the way that they were looked at by ethnographers.” What colours the final edit is a sickening injustice – and, depending on who you are, senses of sorrow, vengeance, anger or guilt.

There’s also a blunt confrontation with the responsibility and violence implicit in the act of looking, the sullenness, resistance and pain in the gazes of the film’s unwilling, exploited subjects, compounded by a soundtrack of piercing wails and cries by Angel Bat Dawid and Naima Nefertari, spontaneously recorded in direct response to the video montage just three weeks prior to the show’s opening. “It was one of the most powerful experiences of my professional life,” Diop says, “three of us women gathering in a recording studio right on the edge of Paris, seeing Angel crying in front of these images and with her music repairing, consoling, avenging these women.”

With regards to the reception of her work, Diop cites Simone Leigh’s widely discussed response to the 2019 Whitney Biennial, initially posted on Instagram: “She says that with her art, she’s addressing Black women above all. That’s exactly how I feel.”

Geste de Consolation: A Special Project by Alice Diop at Palais d'Iéna, 9 Place d'Iéna, 75016 Paris until 25 October