Al-Monitor's Dubai culture newsletter led its 29 August 2025 edition with Béchir Boussandel's glass works, tied to a two-part solo show developed with B7L9 Art Centre in Tunis and travelling on to Tabari Artspace in Dubai. The piece frames the exhibition, whose title nods to philosopher Claire Marin's line about being tempted by other suns, as a departure from the canvas paintings for which the Tunisian-French artist is best known.
The glass pieces sit directly on the gallery floor in irregular, fragile shapes, coloured and cast from discarded plastic bottles gathered in Tunisia. Boussandel developed the body of work after meeting a Senegalese waste collector, or berbasha, saving bottles to fund a crossing to Europe, and several sculptures carry cast metal birds rendered motionless, a stand-in for migrants caught between leaving and staying under economic pressure. The newsletter situates the show alongside other Dubai openings that week, including Maitha Abdalla's multimedia exhibition at Abu Dhabi's Cultural Foundation and Ana Escobar Saavedra's debut institutional presentation at 421 Arts Campus.
For Boussandel, the glass sculptures mark a material shift that keeps his long-standing concerns with water, movement and belonging between Tunis and Dubai, following his earlier Tabari solo Land Survey. The Al-Monitor coverage adds regional wire visibility to a body of work that had already been profiled at length in Canvas magazine.
