Ashish Ghadiali: Sensing the Planet

This spring, Thelma Hulbert Gallery (THG) will reopen with a debut solo exhibition by filmmaker and environmental artist, Ashish Ghadiali. Curated by Gemma Girvan, Sensing the Planet brings together a series of three recent film works, Invasion Ecology (2024), Can you tell the time of a running river? (2024) and Planetary Imagination (2023), with a new sound piece reworked from the essay This Part of World Contains a Complete World (2024). Emerging from Ghadiali’s practice as a climate justice activist and documentary filmmaker, the exhibition explores how racial justice serves as a prism for understanding our planet in crisis.

Invasion Ecology is a multichannel video installation reflecting on Charles Elton’s 1958 book, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants. The book is widely considered the theoretical origin of ‘invasion ecology’. In Ghadiali’s installation, the viewer is invited to switch between four channels using a video mixer, bringing together personal histories from the artist’s life with wider political and ecological events. Channel 1 broadcasts a British propaganda film, reporting on the Mau Mau counterinsurgency to British colonial rule in Kenya. Channel 2 combines images of the ‘invasive’ grey squirrel with footage of the artist and his family reading from The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants and The Hunt for Kimathi, Ian Henderson’s account of his capture of Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi. The third and fourth channels delve into Ghadiali’s personal family archive to reflect on questions of representation and self-representation in the Indian diaspora.

Can you tell the time of a running river? was commissioned as part of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery exhibition Dartmoor: a Radical Landscape. The film considers the experiments of James Lovelock and his Gaia theory, which proposes that our planet behaves as a self-regulating system of physical and biological processes. Drawing on conversations that the artist had with Lovelock a year before he died, the film explores what Ghadiali refers to as, ‘new ways of living on Earth, through the recognition of different temporalities: here, the time of a river and the time of a human body’. The film features a soundtrack of Ghadiali’s daughter reading from a reworking of the 10th-century Shaivite sutra, The Doctrine of Recognition. This dialogue punctuates the artist’s interview with Professor Tim Lenton, an eminent climate scientist and close collaborator of Ghadiali. During the film, footage of a flowing river is shown as Ghadiali enters the water repeating the title of the work.

Originally commissioned by The Box, Plymouth the film Planetary Imagination examines connections between climate change and migration. Using The Box’s film and television archives, Ghadiali weaves together interviews with science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, educational clips about the solar system and footage of Plymouth locals talking about their experiences of racial prejudice. Through careful research, Ghadiali brings into contrast recent and historical stories of journeys to and from the South West region including the arrival of Gujarati refugees from Uganda in 1972, the evacuation of villagers in Hallsands in 1917 and the transatlantic explorations conducted by the Pilgrim Fathers and Francis Drake.

The three film works are accompanied by a sound piece reworking Ghadiali’s essay This Part of World Contains a Complete World. In this the artist explores the complicated dynamics of grief, both at the loss of a loved one and the cultural cornerstones that defined their relationship. Reflecting on the way that climate breakdown begets cultural breakdown, Ghadiali shows that climate collapse disproportionately threatens the cultural heritage of the most climate-vulnerable, and sheds light on the colonial violence that underpins climate catastrophe.

A public programme day will be held on April 12, including a keynote presentation by decolonial feminist scholar Francoise Verges, a conversation with Joy Sleeman, director of research at the Slade School of Fine Art UCL, and a participatory session of Radical Ecology’s ongoing research into Dream Ecologies.

Press contact: Alicia Lethbridge, alicia [​at​] sam-talbot.com / T+44 07526204773