I Am Soil. My Tears Are Water: María Magdalena Campos-Pons

Efie Gallery opens in Alserkal Avenue, featuring a solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed Cuban artist, María Magdalena Campos-Pons—marking her debut in the Middle East.

Curated by Faridah Folawiyo, I Am Soil. My Tears Are Water explores diaspora and interconnectedness through the flora and fauna of Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. Hibiscus, sugarcane, and guava leaves—plants rich in cultural significance—appear across painting, sculpture, and an immersive installation created in collaboration with musician Kamaal Malak.

Blending nature and spirituality, Campos-Pons weaves a narrative of migration, memory, and the deep ties between landscapes and histories.

Exploring our interconnectedness with flora and fauna, the Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons weaves a narrative of migration, memory, and the deep ties between landscapes and histories.

About the Artist

María Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959, Matanzas) work addresses history, memory, gender, and religion, investigating the role of each in identity formation. Her practice intermixes photography, painting, sculpture, film, video, and performance. Campos-Pons’s work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Tate Modern, London; amongst many others.

Her work has been exhibited and performed at the Venice Biennale; documenta 14; Havana Biennial; Dakar Biennale; Johannesburg Biennale; Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA; Guggenheim Museum; National Portrait Gallery (Washington, DC); Sharjah Biennial 15 (United Arab Emirates); 14th Gwangju Biennale (South Korea), and the second Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (Saudi Arabia).

In 2023, the Brooklyn Museum and J. Paul Getty Museum organized María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold, a major traveling multimedia survey of her work, the first since 2007. Beginning at the Brooklyn Museum, the show travels to the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Frist Art Museum, and culminates at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2025.

Campos-Pons is also the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University and has founded numerous artist-run programs such as GASP (Boston, 2003), EADJ (Nashville, 2018), and Intermittent Rivers (Cuba, 2019). In 2024, she was awarded the ARTnews Award for Lifetime Achievement.

About the Curator

Faridah Folawiyo is an independent curator and researcher with a special focus on contemporary art from the Black world. She received her undergraduate degree in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University and her Masters in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Through FF Projects (founded in 2022), which is a nomadic curatorial platform, Faridah organises exhibitions that focus on Black artists on the continent and in the diaspora. The independently produced Manifold, which is an iterative exhibition highlighting the work of emerging black female-identifying and non-binary artists, debuted in London in November 2022, and its third edition took place in Lagos in October 2024. Building on her dedication to showing and archiving Black art, Faridah has always created publications to go alongside her exhibitions. In September 2024, she also published a book called Manifold Archives, chronicling the two Manifold editions in London. She followed this up with Lagos, I Love You, But…a zine that served as a love letter to her hometown.

Her recent curatorial work includes Manifold Lagos (October 2024); Elastic Visions at Efie Gallery, Dubai (March 2024); Image Impressions at the Vaughan-Richards House in Lagos, Nigeria (November 2023); the independently produced Manifold (November 2022), and its follow up Manifold (Deluxe) at Frieze No. 9 Cork Street (April 2023).

She has written for publications such as Mousse Magazine, Nka Journal, TSA Art Magazine, Service95; and has been featured in the likes of Vogue, NPR, Wallpaper Magazine, Native, Sotheby’s, and HURS.