Art Basel Paris 2026: cinema, dance, sculpture... Alice Diop and Miu Miu take over the Palais d’Iéna

Art lovers can already pencil in the dates—Art Basel Paris returns for its fifth edition in the capital, from October 23 to 25, 2026. Regarded as the autumn’s premier contemporary art fair, it will occupy the grand fair of autumn contemporary art, taking over the Grand Palais with more than 200 galleries from around the world. But Art Basel isn’t just about the glass roof... Once again this year, the fair goes beyond the walls and lands at several of the city’s iconic venues. On the agenda? Exhibitions, installations, monumental sculptures and freely accessible curatorial projects, aimed at letting art spill out into the streets of Paris. The must-see venues? The Hôtel de la Marine, the Domaine du Palais Royal, and the Place Vendôme.

Among the must-see highlights, Miu Miu is returning to the Palais d’Iéna, in the 16th arrondissement, for the third year running as the official partner of the public program. After Tales & Tellers in 2024 and 30 Blizzards in 2025, the house shifts gears and hands the venue’s keys to French filmmaker Alice Diop. She presents Geste de Consolation, her very first exhibition, open to the public from 21 to 25 October 2026.

Here, there’s no aim to simply place a handful of works between two columns. Alice Diop transforms the Palais d’Iéna into a four-space scenographic route, centered on a question that runs through her cinema: the representation of Black women and how these images continue to shape how we look. Film, photography, sculpture, poetry, music and dance respond to one another there, in an edit conceived as a sequence of scenes.

• To be read
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• Contemporary art in Paris: what to do during the week of the Art Basel Paris 2025 fair?
• Art Basel Paris 2025: events and meetings in Paris during the art week

The route opens with a photograph by Zanele Muholi, before sliding into a video installation by Alice Diop that blends archives with film excerpts. Further on, Chambre à soi takes the form of an open library, accessible to all, set in a décor inspired by a motif from artist Mary Lee Bendolph. Then the voices rise another notch in a performance arena where texts by Penda Diouf, Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Marie NDiaye, and Zadie Smith resonate.

The dance then takes the spotlight with an adaptation of Prophetic by Ivorian choreographer Nadia Beugré, while the composer Angel Bat Dawid performs with her ensemble. At the end of the route, a scale-up: the monumental sculpture Sentinel (Mami Wata) by Simone Leigh, standing at almost five meters, overlooks the space.

Consolation Gesture will be open to the public from October 21 to 25, 2026 at the Palais d’Iéna, as part of the Art Basel Paris public program. The online reservations for guided tours will open on October 8 on the Miu Miu site. It’s a good chance to drop by Jena between two stops of Art Basel Paris.