Tabari Artspace

Tenté par d'autres soleils (Tempted By Other Suns), Béchir Boussandel
Tabari Artspace Dubai Following its debut in Tunis, the exhibition travels to Dubai, where it continues at Tabari Artspace from 3 June to 5 September 2025. For Béchir Boussandel—an artist of Tunisian heritage,...
Curator Juliette Hage on Bechir Boussandel’s Shift to Sculpture.

Bechir Boussandel’s solo exhibition at Tabari Artspace art gallery demonstrates a new evolution in his practice towards hand-blown glass sculptures that remind of us abandoned territories, human movement and liminal spaces.

Although Bechir Boussandel’s practice is largely centred on painting—a solitary pursuit where the artist immerses his rooftop studio to create canvases inscribed with acrylic and oil paint, forming furrowed landscapes that reinvent geographies like maps or atlases—Tenté par d'autres soleils marks a clear shift into sculpture, articulated through a much more collective gesture.

That said, even in Boussandel’s painterly work, there has always been a sculptural sensibility—visible in his use of non-traditional supports, his thoughtful spatial compositions, and his refusal to adhere to a fixed horizon line. But here we focus on his three-dimensional work, first shown at B7L9: an installation of blown-glass bottles scattered across the exhibition floor. These evoke abandoned territories, liminal spaces that could be anywhere yet belong nowhere—zones of wandering where plastic waste serves as both trace and proof of transient human presence.

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Les glaneurs (The Gleaners) is inspired by Boussandel’s observations of barbechas, waste pickers who walk for hours collecting recyclable materials—plastic bottles, jugs, and containers—which they exchange for a small sum calculated by weight. Under-recognised and increasingly precarious, barbechas have multiplied in Tunisia in recent years. Their labour forms part of an informal economy that Boussandel witnessed up close—particularly through encounters with young men from sub-Saharan Africa who endlessly traverse the neighbourhood near his studio.

From this, crushed water bottles and contorted jugs became a source of visual language for the artist: shapes and colours with sculptural potential. Stripped of their original function, these discarded objects carry a memory—of touch, of time. Rather than treat them as disposable waste, Boussandel collaborated with a ceramic moulding workshop to cast the objects and later reimagine them in blown glass, in partnership with a Tunisian glass manufacturer. This exchange of craft and technique led the artist to embrace accident as an intrinsic element of the process. Several glass pieces emerged flawed—singular, imperfect, and entirely unique. This idea of chance recalls Boussandel’s painting practice and raises essential questions: can the artist ever fully control the work? Doesn’t the artwork always contain something that escapes the artist’s grasp?
Through these accidents, the singularity of each object emerges—emphasising the hand-made gesture over the mechanical logic of postmodern society. The shift from plastic to glass causes confusion in the viewer: glass mimics the look of waste, subverting the usual nobility of the material. Blown glass becomes the imitation of something meant to be discarded. A light object once tossed in the wind now appears heavy, fixed to the ground. Its transparency gives it depth and vulnerability—qualities that mirror the condition of the barbechas, suspended between instability and invisibility.

Among these glass bottles are small birds, initially sculpted in clay, later cast in brass, copper, and aluminium. Others perch above, observing visitors from atop gallery partitions. For Boussandel, birds become metaphors for migrants—beings in constant motion, crossing borders, evading boundaries. With them, questions of freedom surface: freedom of movement, of flight as resistance to territorial constraint. The exhibition’s title borrows from French philosopher Claire Marin: “Like migratory birds, we are always tempted by other suns.” One can’t help but think of the barbechas, those who have come from far away, gleaning from the ground, some still dreaming of crossing into Europe.

Mobility is central to Boussandel’s work, informed by his dual belonging and the hybrid experience of transnational artists who straddle two cultures. For years, Boussandel lived between France and Tunisia, transporting his rolled canvases back and forth to complete them in his parents’ native village. These works, from the moment of their making, carried within them the notion of displacement.
His sculptural work continues this trajectory—a desire to anchor, to reterritorialize what has been uprooted. If the birds gaze from above, others find refuge on the bottles, seeming to say: “this is our place.” The glass, weighed down, rooted in Tunisian soil, calls upon artisanal know-how, tied to centuries-old tradition, and transformed through contemporary gestures.

These back-and-forth movements—between flight and grounding—create an ambivalent space where the longing for mobility collides with the urge to belong. This poetic tension remains at the heart of Bechir Boussandel’s practice.

Juliette Hage is a Franco-Lebanese curator interested in dual cultural belonging, diasporic counter-histories, and how artists navigate memory, silence, and identity through form. She has curated numerous exhibitions and participated in several international curatorial residencies.