Amid a busy week in Paris, Miu Miu invites audiences to a hybrid exhibition and performance art event at the Palais d’Iéna.
Last month, Miu Miu announced its official partnership with Art Basel Paris. Today, partnerships between luxury brands and major art fairs are nothing new, but something is shifting in the nature of these relationships. This year at Freize, we saw the fruits of a second year of partnership between Stone Island and the fair in the thriving ‘Focus’ section, where emerging galleries were given a bursary of 30% of their costs by Stone Island, a significant contribution during such a turbulent time for the art market. Miu Miu’s collaboration with Art Basel also breaks new ground, with a hybrid exhibition and performance art event, Tales & Tellers, at the Palais d’Iéna featuring the work of Meriem Bennani, Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, Shuang Li, Geumhyung Jeong, Sophia Al-Maria, Cécile B.Evans and Goshka Macuga.
Miucca Prada is a known force in the art world. In 2015, she and her husband opened Fondazione Prada, now a closely watched art institution (currently exhibiting the works of Miranda July in Milan and ‘Monte di Pieta’ by Christoph Büchel in Venice). Miu Miu has also ventured into the world of film with ‘Women’s Tales’, running since 2011. The idea of ‘Women’s Tales’ is refreshingly simple: Miu Miu supports a female director in creating a short film, only asking in return that the characters wear Miu Miu. While this may sound as if it would limit the scope of these projects to stories about thin, affluent, white women wearing short skirts, the films in this series span the entire globe, taking us from Malaysia to Italy, New York to Croatia, with a cast of memorable characters.
In Argentina we get to know a wonderful team of women detectives in Laura Citarella’s short film titled El Affaire. They are tracing the ethereal Miu Miu model, decked head to toe in the brand’s trademark florals and peter-pan collars, who breezed into their small town a week before and who has been missing ever since. The detectives, an odd mix of stern, brilliant women, wear the brand too as they drink Sake, fall asleep while pouring over evidence and take midnight car journeys to locate increasingly perplexing clues (Miu Miu dresses suspended in trees and handbags with notes hidden in their linings). The characters in this warm, funny film stay with you. You’ll continue to wonder about the fate of the model, and of all of those gorgeous handbags, presumably stowed away as evidence.
In Shako Mako by Hailey Gates, Alia Shawkat does what she does best – playing a character named Farah who is so unbearably charismatic you spend the duration of the fifteen-minute film hoping that she will both succeed and fail spectacularly. Based in some sort of surreal training ground for the army, Farah is doomed to a role as a bread-seller, a role that she must repeat to provide some “real life experience” for the men in the army. Unhappy with her fate, she begins to invent romantic backstories for her character, filming test videos on sand dunes and wearing a pink dress cinched with a glittering brooch (Miu Miu, of course).
Other films offer an encounter with a female self-defence group (I Am the Beauty of Your Beauty, I am the Fear of Your Fear by Tan Chui Mui), a wordless exchange of gender identity (Malgorzata Szumowska’s Night Walk) and the subversive cool of an all-girl skateboarding group in New York (That One Day by Crystalle Moselle).
Despite the undeniably chic smattering of Miu Miu throughout, these stories are gritty, substantive and thought-provoking. They are clearly the work of women – a high compliment indeed – an alignment of beautiful clothing with subtle feminism that is on brand with everything that Miu Miu has recently put out into the world. In response to its 2024 Spring Summer collection, Sarah Mower wrote in Vogue: “Bringing down the curtain on a confusing and emotionally fraught season, it took the great Miuccia Prada to give such a coherent, empathetic and confidence-building show for women, by a woman.” From the surprisingly comfy cottons of a Miu Miu runway look, to the easy depictions of challenging women, Miu Miu seems to walk the walk where supporting women is concerned.
Now, Miu Miu is inviting the public to literally meet the memorable characters from each of the Women’s Tales commissions in a performance event at the Palais d’Iéna. Part of Art Basel’s public program, it is conceived by interdisciplinary artist Goshka Macuga and convened by Elvira Dyangosi Ose. Within the Palais d’Iena, the films’ heroines stay in character, solving crimes, rehearsing for auditions, overseeing imagined construction sites and practising martial arts.
There is an eerie dialogue between the performing characters and the audience. While I was there, a standup comedian took the stage to ask the crowd, “Do you believe in Jesus? Are you in therapy?” Crowd participation is always awkward, usually provoking a sole response from the audience, but here no one felt the need to respond at all. The boundary between fiction and reality has been distorted in such a way that the event registers successfully as performance art rather than simply a Miu Miu-clad performance. But most importantly, the project is a true celebration of all of the different female characters who have come to life thanks to Miu Miu’s support and the talent of a new generation of women filmmakers.
Words by Emily Burke
