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 how racial justice serves as a way of 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.
‘Can you tell the time of a running river?’ featured as part of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery (RAMM) exhibition Dartmoor: a Radical Landscape.
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.