There are few photographers who can make a juice box look like a Balenciaga bag. Hassan Hajjaj is one of them. Known for framing everyday life in riotous technicolor and giving cultural hybridity a glossy, rebel-with-a-cause finish, the London-by-way-of-Marrakech artist is bringing his unmistakable eye to an unexpected setting: a sun-drenched olive grove in Gabès, Tunisia.
Part art platform, part olive oil brand, Tacapae is the brainchild of Tunisian-French street artist eL Seed using olive oil as a literal and metaphorical medium. Based in southern Tunisia, the platform is rethinking what cultural production looks like when it’s grounded in land, family, and local knowledge.
Kicking off April 27, GABÉS 1447 by Hassan Hajjaj in collaboration with Tacapae is not your average gallery opening. There are no white walls or hushed museum acoustics, instead, the backdrop is Temoula—a working grove nestled in southern Tunisia. This open-air exhibition will be staged as part of the 7th edition of the Gabès Cinéma Fen festival.
It all started last October, when the first-ever Tacapae Harvest brought together a mix of artists, chefs, and local farmers to celebrate olive season—a kind of creative camp-meets-culinary residency set under Tunisia’s olive trees. Michelin-starred chefs Akrame Benallal and Paolo Boscaro cooked family-style meals; Tunisian artist Mohamed Amine Hamouda created a site-specific installation. At the center of it all? Hajjaj, turning the grove into an open-air studio. His camera caught everything from women cultivators in patterned scarves to streetwear-wearing creatives like VHILS, architect Sumayya Vally, and journalist Noor Tagouri moving through the grove.
The result? A body of work that feels intimate, spontaneous, and deeply grounded. It’s also classic Hajjaj. Think: handmade sets, DIY chic, bold hues, and frames stuffed with Arabic-branded consumer goods—a cheeky jab at consumer culture and a wink to Islamic geometric design at the same time.
Born in Larache, Morocco in 1961, Hajjaj has long played with dualities—North Africa and the UK, high culture and pop kitsch, tradition and disruption. Over the years, he’s built a reputation as the “Andy Warhol of Marrakech,” though his visual language leans more street than soup can. His work has shown at major institutions like the V&A in London, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, and the Brooklyn Museum. But this olive grove show? It hits differently.
Curator Sumayya Vally puts it best: “The language Hassan works in comes from an embodied way of being and seeing.” His photos, she explains, don’t just capture moments—they translate them, bending time and place into something you can feel. There’s a duality to his work that mirrors the lives of so many across the MENA diaspora: London one day, Marrakesh the next. A tea glass here, a Nike swoosh there.
The exhibition runs through May 1, right as Gabès Cinéma Fen wraps its annual program dedicated to contemporary moving image practices. So if you’re in Tunisia—or even vaguely tempted to book a flight—consider this your sign. Because where else can you enjoy freshly pressed olive oil under the stars, walk through an art show in the grass, and talk postcolonial aesthetics with some of the most interesting voices in the region?
Exactly.
