OpenSpace UAE, the Dubai arts and culture platform, published a feature on Tenté par d'autres soleils (Tempted By Other Suns), Béchir Boussandel's solo exhibition at Tabari, on 5 August 2025, while the show was on view until 5 September 2025. The piece describes the Dubai presentation as an expanded version of its earlier iteration in Tunis, continuing the artist's materially experimental inquiry into displacement, survival and the quiet poetry of everyday resilience.
The title comes from a reflection by the philosopher Claire Marin: "Like migratory birds, we are always tempted by other suns." OpenSpace describes Boussandel's aerial canvases, soaked in water and exposed to natural forces on the rooftop of his family home in Bizerte, then layered with oil pigments in the studio, as resembling eroded landscapes, not literal maps but affective terrains of diasporic life. New to Dubai is a series of blown glass sculptures centred on the berbasha, the gleaners who collect discarded plastics in Tunis. Casts of real plastic bottles were turned into plaster moulds and blown into glass with Sadika, a Tunisian glass studio, and each vessel is capped with a bird cast in aluminium or copper, a form of stilled migration.
Born in Dunkirk in 1984 and a graduate of the École des Beaux Arts de Dunkerque, Boussandel divides his time between France and Tunisia. His work is held by the Ministry of Culture and Youth in Abu Dhabi, the Deji Art Museum in Shanghai and MACAAL in Morocco.