LAST CHANCE Asunción Molinos Gordo: The Peasant, the Scholar and the Engineer

Asunción Molinos Gordo’s second major collaboration with Art Jameel – following her 2019 Artist’s Garden, In Transit (Botany of a Journey) – is her first retrospective exhibition in West Asia. This show spans 15 years of Molinos Gordo’s work, tracing her journey from foundational artwork on food systems and agriculture in Egypt and the Arab world to recent investigations of Arab and Muslim heritage in her native Spain.

Central to her work is the concept of pensamiento campesino (peasant knowledge)—the accumulated wisdom and expertise of small farmers over centuries, often overlooked by agronomic science and prevailing notions of progress. Molinos Gordo aims to reclaim this knowledge to foster more sustainable relationships with land, resources, and social harmony. For the artist, this perspective is vital to achieving food sovereignty, sustainability and the long-term stability of the global food supply.

The exhibition brings together key works that defined Molinos Gordo’s engagement with histories of food production and agriculture. They include the 2015 Sharjah Biennial Prize winner WAM (World Agriculture Museum) (2010). Emblematic of the latest developments of her practice, Como solíamos (As we used to) (2020) is a large-scale rammed-earth installation that evokes the vernacular irrigation systems of Al-Andalus and reflects on the transformations of agricultural land over time.