For more than forty years, María Magdalena Campos-Pons’ deeply personal and interdisciplinary practice has explored nature, spirituality and the interconnectedness across cultures and geographies. An exhibition of her new work, I Am Soil. My Tears Are Water, curated by Faridah Folawiyo (14 April – 25 May 2025) inaugurates Efie Gallery’s new 4,400 sq. ft. space in Alserkal Avenue and is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the Middle East. Campos-Pons’ journey as an artist and teacher has taken her around the world from Cuba, where she was born in a sugar plantation town, to Nashville, where she currently lives. Incorporating her national and family history into her art, Campos-Pons addresses history, memory, gender and religion, investigating the role of each inidentity formation.
15 years on from when the work was first created, the artist reimagines her seminal sculptural work Sugar/Bittersweet as a new site-specific installation. 12 antique African spears, sourced from antique collections in the UAE, are installed on traditional West African stools and adorned with glass rings inspired by panela (unrefined cane sugar). To recreate these, she employs her signature glassblowing craftsmanship, casting them in brown, green, black and sugar-infused glass, replicating the materiality of sugar. Comprisedof intricately crafted components that are complex to make and assemble, the scale of the installation reflects the effort it took to create. Resembling a field of sugarcane stalks, this introspective work originally explored the artist’s connection to Cuba’s sugar plantations, the enslaved Black people and later the Chinese indentured laborers who worked on them. In recontextualizing the installation in the Middle East, she expands on the themes of mobility, movement and interconnected histories across diverse geographies.
Efie Gallery has long taken a hybrid approach to visual art and music and a sound map created in collaboration with multifaceted musician and Campos-Pons’s partner, Kamaal Malak, will add to the atmospheric nature of the exhibition. Over 10 new paintings on paper – including 2 particularly large-scale works – focus on flora and fauna native to Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, to examine diaspora and relativity—the idea that all life is intertwined. Hibiscus, sugarcane and guava leaves, among other botanicals rich in cultural significance, feature prominently. Together, these works encourage a deeper appreciation of the power of nature to grow and survive.
A catalogue features contributions from Faridah Folawiyo, Odette Casamayor-Cisneros, Sabrina Moura and Grace Aneiza Ali and expands on themes explored in the exhibition and Campos-Pons practice including healing, ancestral memory, resistance, Afro-Cuban religions, communion with nature, the presence of female narratives in her work and her engagement with the Middle East region.
Campos-Pons’ work also is on view at the gallery’s presentation at Art Dubai (18-20 April).
Press release from Efie Gallery
Image: María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Untitled. 2021. Painting. 117.5 x 83 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Efie Gallery, Dubai.
