Faissel El-Malak, a Palestinian multidisciplinary artist and designer based in Dubai, spent two weeks this year on an artist residency at The New Medina in Sousse, Tunisia, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. Known for work that runs through textiles and collaborative craft practices, El-Malak used the residency to work directly with local artisans, including woodworker Habib El Guesmi and the textile brand Tilli Tanit, rather than arriving with a finished design to produce.
The results of that collaboration will surface later this year in Le désir du cœur (The Heart's Desire), an exhibition opening October 3, 2026 at the Musée d'Art et de Culture Soufis in Paris and running through September 2027. Its centerpiece is a reading room that folds Islamic garden design into a Parisian interior, built around woodwork made with El Guesmi and shaped by Sufi ideas about contemplation.
El-Malak has described El Guesmi's craft as inseparable from its philosophy, saying “he's an artist; it's not just about the materials.” The Sousse residency carried a more personal weight, too: “As a Palestinian, you are always looking for a home,” he said of the project. “Tunisia was one of those places.”
That search shows up most directly in the reading room itself, which El-Malak has framed as “a garden, but not a garden we can imagine... an internal garden” — a space built less to be looked at than to be sat inside, in the same spirit as the residency that produced it.
