The Collector: Selim Bouafsoun on Art and North Africa

I first met Selim Bouafsoun one morning in the Rhine. We were escaping the oppressive heat during Art Basel and the river’s fast-flowing current swept us under a couple of bridges and past the city’s old town. Locals swim there in the summer. Collectors, dealers, artists and other art world hangers-on who descend on Basel each year also traditionally take the plunge. After two frantic days of reporting, the last thing I wanted to do was talk about art, but I called Bouafsoun earlier this week. The Tunisian-born, Dubai-based financier is a big collector – he’s friendly, open and engaged in the market, so the ideal person to profile for The Art Journal’s collector series. 

Our conversation, however, quickly moved beyond the art hanging on his walls. This was welcomed. Bouafsoun’s collection, which he started in 2015 and now spans more than 100 artists, sits within the Nafas Collection. 

He set it up with his wife, Houda. Bouafsoun deliberately calls it a collection rather than a foundation because, as he explained, the latter would bring trustees, regulations and admin, things he has no time for. The looser structure gives the couple the flexibility to support projects on an ad hoc basis.

Nafas was initially launched as a charity during the pandemic in 2021, raising funds through the sale of artworks to buy oxygen concentrators and other medical equipment for Tunisia. It has since expanded to include museum loans, support for non-profit organisations and an artist residency in Tunisia, alongside a four-year programme with Gasworks, the contemporary arts organisation in Vauxhall. Bouafsoun helps to bring artists from North Africa to London.

“Everything that is called art in my house has fallen under Nafas now,” he said. “The idea is that Nafas is both the collection and any patronage work that we do.” 

Alvaro Barrington Grace, Bather, September, 2024 oil, acrylic, Flashe on paper in walnut, corrugated steel and reclaimed wood frame

Bouafsoun’s taste leans heavily on abstraction, geometry and work that engages with questions of power, identity, religion, and colonialism. “I’ve always been fascinated by history and geography and where we are,” he said. “There’s always this idea of order. When you like geometry, you like order.”

“Nafas” means “breath” in Arabic, a meaning Bouafsoun has embraced as a description of what he hopes the collection can provide to artists and the wider cultural ecosystem: time, continuity and room to develop. “We want to give a long breath to the artist, to the community, to us as collectors,” he told me. “So that we have time to do it and take our time and patience to do it.”

That idea of duration is particularly evident in the couple’s support for artists from North Africa, namely Tunisia, Algeria, Libya and Morocco. The residency programme in Tunisia works in the other direction, giving artists an opportunity to spend time in the country where Bouafsoun grew up.

“It gives me the chance to be closer to the artists. It gives me the chance to show them my country,” he said. One artist who came from New York told him that the quality of the Tunisian light had changed the way she thought about colour and would influence her palette. Those kinds of encounters are part of the point of patronage for Bouafsoun.

In earlier interviews, he has tended to describe collecting in more instinctive terms, talking about buying works ‘he was in love with’ and describing his collection as ‘an ever-evolving puzzle of a growing artistic eye’. But our conversation revealed a more strategic side to his approach. He pays close attention to the machinery around an artist: who is talking to whom, which galleries might be circling, what exhibitions are coming up and, crucially, who might represent an artist next.

Rafik El Kamel Sidi Mehrez, 2004 Acrylic on canvas

“Pricing, momentum, insider information, upcoming shows, upcoming information,” he said, when asked what influences his buying decisions. “Things that you only get from insiders, things that you pick up in discussions with gallerists, with friends, with those who know what’s going to happen next.”

The word that came up repeatedly in our conversation was “access”. He said a change in representation can alter the prospects of acquiring an artist just as dramatically as it can alter their prices. “The problem isn’t just the £50,000,” he said. “The problem is the access that changes.”

Access, he said, is also a question of timing. He’s particularly interested in artists before they have entered the orbit of a major gallery, when prices are lower but, more importantly, when the relationship between artist and collector can still develop. He was candid about wanting the artists he collects to be in the ascendancy. “At this stage, I need a trajectory, otherwise, it’s buying for the sake of buying,” he said.

His view of the art world is therefore distinctly systemic. Bouafsoun compares the career of an artist to that of a footballer in Brazil. “There may be countless talented players, but only a fraction will make it into the national team,” he says. 

“It’s not that the small ones aren’t good players, but they will never be known. Unfortunately, we’re in this society where, if you’re not in the game, you’re out.”

Nidhal Chamekh Et si Carthage ? #2, 2023 Ink, graphite and transfer on paper, scaffolding

This outlook informs his interest in galleries and institutions as much as the artists themselves. “I like for artists to be guided,” he said. “I like for them, especially when they’re at the early stages of their career, to be mentored.” In his view, galleries provide a kind of structure around artists who might otherwise struggle to navigate the industry.

There’s a pragmatism here that runs through his collecting. Bouafsoun does not pretend that the market’s financial mechanisms are irrelevant to his decisions, but neither does he see price as a simple proxy for artistic quality. “The market also measures success by monetary value, which isn’t necessarily right,” he said. “Especially with conceptual art. Many artists out there have marked history, but they’re not necessarily the most expensive things.”

The fresh-faced Tunisian remains concerned about the conditions producing these high prices in the first place. He’s worried about the number of galleries closing and about a market built around prices that are increasingly difficult to sustain. “I’m sad when I see that a gallery like Stephen Friedman is closing,” he said. “I’m sad when I see news every day of a gallery closing.”

He said the problem goes beyond individual galleries and pointed to rapidly rising prices for young artists, the cost of fair booths and a smaller pool of collectors willing or able to sustain them. “I think what got us here is the wrong pricing,” he said. “This crazy hot money, selling artists for silly prices.”

Bouafsoun is particularly critical of galleries that push young artists’ prices too quickly. “It is not normal that a 30-year-old artist is selling at £100,000,” he said. “Where are you going to sell him next? The problem is not necessarily demand but what happens when that demand starts to disappear. A gallery can sell an artist at an inflated price once; maintaining that market over decades is another matter.”

Emma Fineman Refractions, 2023 Oil, charcoal, encaustic on canvas

His own approach is to stay relatively disciplined, despite his reputation for being a little trigger-happy when collecting. “I buy what I like. I don’t follow the hype,” he said. But that doesn’t mean stepping away from the market. If anything, his interest in residencies, institutions and artists suggests he wants to be more involved in the ecosystem around collecting, rather than simply buying its products.

That is part of what makes the residency in Tunisia so important to him. It changes the relationship between collector and artist, giving him a reason to spend time with artists outside the transactional environment of fairs and galleries.

“We need to continue helping the artists,” he said. “We need to continue helping the system because they rely on us and we rely on them.”