Simone Leigh, Sentinel (Mami Wata), 2020–21. Installation view: Prospect. 5, New Orleans, 2021–22. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans
Photography by Alex Marks
At the Palais d’Iéna, Alice Diop is making room for a library. Chambre à soi, a living room with carpets featuring a motif by Mary Lee Bendolph, will hold the books that have shaped her thinking and offer somewhere to sit and read. Within the building’s monumental concrete architecture, familiar as the setting for Miu Miu’s shows, this domestic space gives a personal subject a public home.
Conceived at Miuccia Prada’s invitation for Art Basel Paris, Geste de Consolation is the filmmaker’s first exhibition. It follows Fragments for Venus, her 2025 contribution to Miu Miu Women’s Tales, and continues her examination of how Black women have been represented and fetishised throughout art history. Here, Diop gathers the artists and writers whose work has sustained her, women who, she says, have healed and nourished her. Their presence gives the exhibition the intimacy of a self-portrait made through other people’s work.
Alice Diop by Brigitte Lacombe
A photograph by Zanele Muholi opens the route. Diop’s own installation brings together archival images and film excerpts across two screens, placing images that have troubled her alongside those that have offered comfort. Across four connected spaces, she applies the logic of film editing to an exhibition: an image leads into a room, a room into a voice, with meaning emerging through their proximity.
Texts by writers including Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Zora Neale Hurston and Marie NDiaye will be read aloud. The programme also includes an adapted version of Nadia Beugré’s Prophétique and performances by Angel Bat Dawid with Sistazz of the Nitty-Gritty. Reading, listening and watching become shared activities, and Chambre à soi extends that invitation: visitors can sit with the books behind a filmmaker’s way of seeing and follow an interest at their own pace.
The route ends with Simone Leigh’s Sentinel (Mami Wata). Nearly five metres tall, the bronze figure is encircled by a serpent and draws on a water spirit whose image has travelled across Africa and its diasporas. Her scale introduces something formidable into this gathering. Diop’s choice to close with a figure associated with both creation and destruction gives the word “consolation” an unexpected edge.
Hand image: “Sénégal en saison sèche,” FPA, 1920. Background pattern: Mary Lee Bendolph, “Basket Wave” Variation
Geste de Consolation, conceived by Alice Diop for Miu Miu, is part of Art Basel Paris’s Public Program.
Palais d’Iéna, Paris, 21–25 October 2026.
