Debut solo exhibition by filmmaker and artist Ashish Ghadiali.
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 racial justice as a prism for better understanding our planet in crisis.
Ghadiali’s work blends deeply personal narratives with vast ecological theories and documentation of major historical events, examining the relationship between colonial violence and ecological breakdown.
Read: Ashish Ghadiali in conversation with Olivia Blocker, from Climate Migration Collaborative.
Coordinating event – Saturday 12 April: Land, Art & Justice.
A day of public engagement reflecting on themes in the exhibition:
11.00 – 12.30: Ashish Ghadiali in conversation with Joy Sleeman, Director of Research at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. £5 – book
12.30 – 1.30: Lunch
1.30 – 3.00: Dream Ecologies: a participatory session from the Dream Ecologies collective. Free, drop in.
4.00 – 5.00: Keynote presentation by eminent decolonial feminist scholar Françoise Vergès. Sensing the Planet completes a trilogy of lectures delivered by Vergès for Radical Ecology. £10
photo credit: ‘Can you tell the time of a running river?’ © Ashish Ghadiali. Commissioned by Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM), 2024
About the artist: Ashish Ghadiali is Radical Ecology’s Founder/Director, a trustee of Newlyn Art Gallery and a sessional youth worker at Mountwise Neighbourhood Centre in Devonport. His creative practice explores the intersections of racial justice, art and ecology through text, film, activism and performance. Moving image works include the film installations Can you tell the time of a running river? (2024), Invasion Ecology (2024), Planetary Imagination (2023) and the feature documentary, The Confession (2016). Performance works include Where do we go when we realise that we can’t go back to nature? (2024) and A Silent Walk (2023). Curatorial credits include the exhibition Against Apartheid (2023) at KARST and public programmes including Migrant Futurism (2023) at the Southbank Centre, Equilibrium (2022) at Serpentine and Sensing the Planet (2021) at Dartington Hall. He was a co-author of the paper, Quantifying the Human Cost of Global Warming (2023) for Nature Sustainability and is a frequent contributor on art, literature and the environment for the Guardian and The Observer. In 2021, he led on political strategy for the COP26 civil society coalition and was activist-in-residence at UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the study of racism and racialisation. He is currently working on a book, Dart River, for Hutchinson Heinemann. Through it, he explores the psychogeographies of empire in the corner of rural South-West England where he lives.
Film still from Can you tell the time of a running river? (credit: Ashish Ghadiali, 2024)
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