The exhibition explores a tension between migration, memory, and urban metamorphosis through a materially symbolic language. Béchir Boussandel, a figure divided between Tunisia and France, shapes mental landscapes that speak of the social invisibility of gleaners - the “gleaner” or "berbasha" - transforming organic materials, blown glass, oil paint, and metal into emotional geographies of survival and belonging. His practice originates from a dialogue with water: paintings laid out on the terrace floor of his childhood home in Bizerte, which become imaginary topographies, marks suspended between dislocation and rootedness. In this Dubai iteration, Boussandel expands his vocabulary by introducing new blown-glass forms, where the fragile lightness of the material contrasts with the semantic weight of a life lived on the margins. The exhibition does not present itself as an anthology of documentary images, but as a narrative installation in which each work acts as a knot of connections: between matter and gesture, between apparent stillness and subterranean movement, between the daily act of gathering and a mythology of the migrant body. The worked surfaces, woven with viscous tension and sandy hues, whisper stories of edges, of impermanent identities, of gazes seeking another sun elsewhere. In this context, Tempted by Other Suns becomes an experiential and reflective journey. The exhibition suggests a suspended space that rejects comfort and invites attentive listening to those who live in exile or straddle different worlds. It is an invitation to feel, through material, the multiple trajectories of a collective body constantly reaching for other skies.
