Inside Miu Miu’s Tales and Tellers Show in Paris

Over the past couple of decades, fashion and art have become more intertwined than ever—consider the raft of collaborations and sponsorships that we see on runways and in museums on a regular basis. Few people in fashion, however, have embraced the art world more seriously—or confidently—than Miuccia Prada. An active collector herself, she has put Milan on the contemporary art map with the Fondazione Prada, which specializes in forward-thinking exhibitions that pay tribute to established artists as well as on-the-verge talents.

With Miu Miu, her more experimental line, Prada has promoted the arts in a very specific way. Since 2011, through her “Women’s Tales” project, she has commissioned female artists and directors to create films exploring the many facets of femininity, and the world around them. Now in its 28th iteration, the series has featured quite a roster, including Agnès Varda, Janicza Bravo, Zoe Cassavetes, Miranda July, and Crystal Moselle. For the past three years, Prada has also asked artists to develop site-specific pieces at the Palais d’Iena in Paris, where the Miu Miu runway shows take place, to create a dialogue with the clothes and highlight the potential of art to move across boundaries.

Many of these creative powerhouses gathered in Paris this week for “Tales and Tellers” a powerful exhibition staged at the Palais d’Iena. Convened by Elvira Dyangani Ose, the director of the Contemporary Art Museum of Barcelona, it was curated by the Polish artist Goshka Macuga, who was the subject of an exhibition at the Fondazione Prada in 2016. Macuga was also responsible for the artistic intervention at Miu Miu’s most recent show: a newspaper called “The Truthless Times,” which imagined a not-so-distant future where truth might be considered radical, and the news could be a form of mental and linguistic acrobatics. (A sample headline: “Endings Unending as Future Moves to Past.”)

The exhibition, which is taking place in the context of Art Basel Paris, highlights every film and artistic intervention produced so far. The “Tales” are screened individually, and key roles in each production are reenacted live by a rotating cast of actors directed by the theater and opera director Fabio Cherstich. The idea was to create vignettes that sparked dialogue about and between the films; seeing them all together, the cumulative effect is like a torrent of experiences and sensations that jump from the screen into real life.

Although the films are as diverse as the women who created them, they tackle common subjects, like the idea of vanity—a term that is often associated with superficiality, but which can also be interpreted as the way we construct a sense of self or choose to present ourselves to the world. These and other topics were addressed over a series of talks featuring panelists like Ava Duvernay, Chloé Sevigny, and Catherine Martin. “I have a history of collaborating with other artists, so perhaps that’s why I was invited to do this exhibition,” said Macuga. “There is a variety of experiences you can have here: seeing the films up close and intimately, or through the live performers. And of course, with the talks, you can even meet some of the filmmakers in person.”

With such an assemblage of talent and stimulation, some in the room were left speechless during the vernissage. But perhaps one anonymous, overheard attendee put it best: “It’s like Mrs. Prada’s Eras tour,” she said.