Miu Miu has handed this year's Art Basel Paris public commission to the French filmmaker Alice Diop, whose Geste de Consolation has opened at the Palais d'Iena in Paris and runs from 21 to 25 October. Commissioned by Miuccia Prada, the project marks the fashion house's third year as the fair's Public Program partner, following installations by Goshka Macuga and Helen Marten.

The installation is Diop's first venture into exhibition-making and extends the arguments of Fragments for Venus, the short film she made for Miu Miu's Women's Tales series in 2025. Her subject is the way Black women have been pictured and looked at across centuries of Western visual culture, and what she frames as acts of consolation created by Black women artists to mend that fetishizing gaze.

The route opens with a photograph by Zanele Muholi and a two-screen video piece in which Diop layers archival imagery with film excerpts. It then gives way to Chambre a soi, a domestic-style library laid with rugs patterned by Mary Lee Bendolph and stocked with the books that shaped Diop's thinking. At its centre, performers read aloud texts by writers including Zora Neale Hurston, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Marie NDiaye and Zadie Smith, followed by Nadia Beugre's choreography Prophetique for six dancers and music from the Chicago composer Angel Bat Dawid and her ensemble.

The journey closes with Simone Leigh's Sentinel (Mami Wata), a nearly five-metre-tall bronze of the West African water spirit accompanied by a serpent. Diop presents the whole sequence as a kind of montage: no single storyline, but a set of encounters meant to show that images can wound — and that they can also be reworked.