Inside the Shanghai Exhibition Center, the lights came up on a circle of performers. Each one had stepped out of a Miu Miu film or a Miu Miu runway, and now they moved through the hall as living characters.
Tales & Tellers reached its third city this month. The performance opened to the public on 6 and 7 June, after a vernissage beneath the building's tiered spire. Miuccia Prada first imagined the project. The artist Goshka Macuga built it into a piece of theatre.
The cast
Macuga works across sculpture, film and installation, and she treats the Miu Miu archive as raw material. Every artistic intervention from a past Miu Miu show became a character. Every film from the Miu Miu Women's Tales series became a character too. Live actors gave them bodies, and the hall filled with figures who had only ever existed on a screen or on a runway.
The conceit is simple and a little strange. A wardrobe walks. A short film steps down from its frame and stands at your shoulder. Visitors moved among the performers rather than watching from a fixed seat, which collapsed the usual distance between an audience and a show.
The makers
Elvira Dyangani Ose convened the project. She is the curator and artistic director of the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial, and she shaped how the characters met the crowd. Fabio Cherstich, a theatre and opera director, staged the movement. The result sat somewhere between an exhibition, a performance and a fashion presentation, and never settled into any one of them.
Much of the source material comes from the Miu Miu Women's Tales films. Since 2011 the house has commissioned women directors to make short films, and the series has grown into one of fashion's longer patronages of cinema. Tales & Tellers pulls those films into a single room and lets their women share a floor.
A wardrobe becomes a cast. A film becomes a person you can stand beside.
The Splendid EditThree cities
The project began at the Palais d'Iéna during Art Basel Paris in October 2024. A year later it was rebuilt for the Terminal Warehouse in New York. Shanghai is the third version, and the first in Asia, set inside a 1955 hall the city raised as a monument to friendship with the Soviet Union.
The building does its own work. The Shanghai Exhibition Center carries a long memory of spectacle and ceremony, and Miu Miu used that grandeur as a stage rather than a backdrop. The performers crossed its marble beneath the chandeliers, in front of a screen carrying scenes from the films.
Miu Miu Tales & Tellers, Shanghai Exhibition Center. Courtesy of Miu Miu
Tales & Tellers treats femininity as plural. Many women, many stories, many ways of being looked at and looking back. In Shanghai, for two days, they all stood in the same light.