A Dual Exhibition: A Dialogue Between Two Major Contemporary Visual Artists
La Presse — On December 12, 2025, the Selma Feriani gallery is set to open a new chapter: a dual exhibition that brings together two major artists from the contemporary visual scene, Jellel Gasteli and Younès Ben Slimane. Two distinct styles, two sensitivities, and a shared desire to explore reality and its shadowy areas. Alongside their works, a reading room has been designed as an intellectual breathing space, a threshold where a new way of encountering art is invented.
Jellel Gasteli: Hortus, a Garden of Memory
With Hortus, Jellel Gasteli returns to a pivotal moment in his life as a young photographer. In 1983, he secretly crossed the barrier of fig trees that protected the Henson garden, a place where nature unfolded without restraint, a refuge for peacocks and intricate vegetation. In a narrative that blends intimate journaling and mental archiving, Gasteli describes this first crossing as an epiphany: The long sandy path lined with cypress trees, the pond, the staircase leading to a small dune that touches the sea... and, at the end of the path, the appearance of a distant silhouette. A few months later, he returned — this time ringing the gatebell. Between these two gestures, a boundary was erased: the one that separates furtive glances from deliberate gazes, transforming the location into a matrix for photographic work where nature, space, and imagination merge. Today, Hortus retranscribes this original moment through a series where Gasteli revisits landscapes as one relives a founding memory. The Mediterranean light, the precision of the framing, and the almost tactile relationship with plant material inscribe this exhibition into the continuity of an oeuvre whose strength lies as much in rigor as in sensitivity.
Born in 1958 in Tunis, Jellel Gasteli is one of the great photographic voices of the Maghreb and the Mediterranean. Emerging from a practice of large-format black and white argentic photography before fully embracing color, he explores African, Saharan, and coastal territories with a unique sensitivity. His works have been integrated into major collections: Fnac, Institut du Monde arabe, Maison européenne de la photographie, Guggenheim New York, Museum Kunstpalast, Collection Sindika Dokolo, and the Tunisian Ministry of Culture. His exhibitions, from Tunis to Paris, Frankfurt, and Washington, have shaped a trajectory where formal precision constantly dialogues with secret emotion.
Younès Ben Slimane: We Knew How Beautiful These Islands Were
Upstairs, the atmosphere shifts. Younès Ben Slimane leads us into a nocturnal, almost ritual universe. A solitary figure digs a grave in a desert cemetery. The wind, the crackling of fire, the scraping of the shovel against the earth — everything breathes mystery, unease, and beauty. In this suspended space, abandoned objects become signs: A doll's head, a comb, a lipstick. Tiny, poignant relics, like the last testimonies of vanished lives. The video is bathed in a golden chiaroscuro, a rare light that comes from the stars or a headlamp, transforming each gesture into a silent incantation. Ben Slimane constructs a visual meditation on finitude, erasure, absence — but also on the persistence of traces. The islands of the title may be real or imaginary. They are above all the inner islands we carry, where memory resists.
Born in 1992 in Tunis, Younès Ben Slimane is a filmmaker, visual artist, and architect. A graduate of Le Fresnoy, he questions memory, landscape, and non-linear narratives. His works have been presented at the Mucem, the Dakar Biennale, the Zaha Hadid Foundation, the Wexner Center, and the Beirut Art Center. His films have captivated Locarno, CPH: Dox, and Vila do Conde. Recipient of the Adiaf Emergence Grant, the Loop Barcelona Award, and the Tanit d'Or at the Carthage Film Days, he has been a resident at the Villa Médicis and AlUla Arts. His works are now part of major collections, from the Macba to Kadist.
The Reading Room: A Space to Breathe
On the mezzanine, a different rhythm settles in. Neither an extension of the exhibitions nor a parallel space, the reading room offers a third time: slower, more interior. Here, books, archives, and theoretical or poetic fragments compose a living archive, not explanatory but resonant. One reads, flips through, and thinks. This space accompanies the works of Gasteli and Ben Slimane without enclosing them in a single reading. Instead, it opens up paths: those of imaginations, geographies, and narratives that intersect and invent themselves. Between Gasteli's vegetal light and Ben Slimane's vibrant night, the exhibition proposes a true crossing: That of the visible and the invisible, of memory and enigma, of landscape as writing and gesture as ritual. A vernissage where the gallery becomes, for the duration of a winter evening, a laboratory of images, a territory of meaning, a space where art continues to say with force and gentleness what words alone cannot contain.
