At the core of Miuccia Prada’s Miu Miu is a fascination with the lives of women: their experiences, their histories, their tales. This has always included culture, alongside fashion: in 2011, Miu Miu Women’s Tales launched, platforming female filmmakers to present their own views of the plurality of femininity. And since 2021, the biannual Miu Miu runway show has been reshaped as a forum for dialogue with artists through installation and motion image, exploring multiple ideas but always returning to an understanding of women.
As part of the brand’s collaboration with Art Basel Paris as Public Program Official Partner this year, Miu Miu announces ‘Tales & Tellers’ a major project at Palais d’Iena headquarters of France’s Economic, Social and Environmental Council – as well as the site of the Miu Miu runway shows. ‘Tales & Tellers’ conceived by interdisciplinary artist Goshka Macuga and convened by Elvira Dyangani Ose, Director of MACBA., Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. In the same location, Macuga will also collaborate with Miu Miu on an artistic intervention to accompany the Spring/Summer 2025 runway show, on October 1 2024.

`Tales & Tellers’ draws its title from the conveyance of knowledge an expression of meaning, the imparting of histories and stories. A story can change minds, alter courses, shift lives, and give us a new understanding of the world. Here, the tales are individual, but their tellers are multitude: the directors themselves, the actors bringing their characters to life. In each instance, women are given agency to tell their stories, story-tellers, history tellers. Throughout, the notion of the teller is as an interpreter of life -offering their view, bearing witness, and reflecting society.
`Tales & Tellers’ brings together a multiverse of narratives, but also the knowledge that thrives from them. Every collaboration and film commission Miu Miu Women’s Tales – and a selection of video pieces taken from the artistic interventions from Miu Miu runway shows since Spring/Summer 2022 – is represented in the show by a character, a hero or an anti-hero, directly extracted from these films and artistic collaborations. These figures in turn become the films’ custodians – agents of the narrative. Reenacted by real-life actors, alongside video projection of the original film, these tellers multiply their tales, their appearance serving as physical re-tellings of fragments of the story alongside the original. Performers of the self, as much of themselves, custodians here must be understood as guardians whose essential role is preserving the memories and sequences of her and others while making the stories accessible. Thus, in `Tales & Tellers’, the empty space of Palais d’Iena is transformed into an accumulation of multiple everyday experiences, real and imagined, that of the custodians and the members of the live audiences that will come to interact with them.

`Tales & Tellers’ will also include screenings of all commissioned short films, together with a programming of conversations: influenced by Miu Miu’s collaborations across the spectrum of filmmaking, art and fashion, the project draws together a myriad of narratives and storytelling exploring ever-transforming ideas of femininity.

In turn, Macuga and Dyangani Ose transform the Palais d’Iena into a concourse for dialogue, both through action and conversation. While the main hypostyle forms a stage for artistic intervention, its parliament becomes an arena for discussion, inviting directors of Miu Miu Women’s Tales and artists who have created video work from the Miu Miu shows to speak not specifically about their films, but rather their own lives and histories, the frames of their work. The result is a discourse not on the physical expression of these women’s creativity, but on their origins – the reasons and thinking behind – telling their own tales.
`Tales & Tellers’ is part of Art Basel Paris’s Public Program and will be staged at the Palais (Plena, Paris. The project is open to the public from 16th-20th October 2024, with a preview on October 15th. Online registration for exhibition guided tours and panel conversations will be available on miumiu.com from October 3.

Art Basel Paris’ Public Program will feature freely accessible exhibitions, installations, monumental sculptures, and curatorial projects by modern and contemporary artists across nine storied locations of the French capital.
For more information about ‘Tales & Tellers’ visit miumiu.com