Asunción Molinos Gordo

The Peasant, the Scholar and the Engineer

April 16 – September 21, 2025 

Throughout her practice, Asunción Molinos Gordo centres the perspectives and knowledge of farming communities. She celebrates their expertise as intellectuals and engineers who design complex systems for tending to the land and growing crops, reflecting their ability to organise the world. ‘The Peasant, the Scholar and the Engineer’ spans fifteen 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.

For the artist, land and soil are repositories of knowledge whose destruction results in the irreversible loss of environmental and cultural heritage. Many of Molinos Gordo’s works examine food as an aspect of global politics, one that affects people in their daily lives. She also investigates water supply and irrigation, specifically the concept of water democracy—a system where water is distributed equitably, fostering social cohesion in contrast to its ongoing privatisation and confiscation. 

The exhibition brings together key works that defined Molinos Gordo’s engagement with histories of food production and agriculture. Among them is WAM (World Agriculture Museum) (2010), a breakthrough piece first staged in a Downtown Cairo apartment and now recreated in Dubai. 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—echoing the UAE’s falaj system—and reflects on the transformations of agricultural land over time.

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 Peasant, the Scholar and the Engineer’ is Asunción Molinos Gordo’s first retrospective exhibition in West Asia. It marks her second major collaboration with Art Jameel, following the 2019 Artist’s Garden, In Transit (Botany of a Journey).

Asunción Molinos Gordo (b. 1979) is a research-based artist strongly influenced by anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. Her practice questions the definition of innovation in contemporary mainstream discourses, working to generate a less urban-centric way of understanding progress. She has produced work reflecting on land use, nomad architecture, farmer strikes, territorial bureaucracy, transformation of rural labour, biotechnology and global food trade.

Molinos Gordo won the Sharjah Biennial Prize 2015 with her project WAM (World Agriculture Museum) and represented Spain at the 13th Havana Biennial in 2019. She obtained her B.F.A. from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where she also pursued her Master’s in Contemporary Art Theory and Practice. She is currently studying Anthropology and Ethnography at UNED (Spain).

With support from the Embassy of Spain in the United Arab Emirates and Travesía Cuatro