New exhibition by Ashish Ghadiali marks the reopening of Thelma Hulbert Gallery (THG).
THG will reopen with a debut solo exhibition by filmmaker and environmental artist, Ashish Ghadiali.
After a three month-refurbishment programme, THG will relaunch their 2025 exhibition programme with Sensing the Planet, a new exhibition featuring key works by Ashish Ghadiali.
Curated by Gemma Girvan from THG, 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.
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’, which examines the effects of novel species to a region and distinguishes between ‘native’ and ‘invasive’ species. 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 in 1958. 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. Channel 3 features British TV programmes about India from the 1980s, originally taped by the artist’s mother, while channel 4 comprises a home video, shot by the artist’s father on a family trip to the USA in 1986.
Can you tell the time of a running river? was commissioned as part of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery (RAMM) exhibition Dartmoor: a Radical Landscape. It is a film work reflecting on the experiments of the theorist James Lovelock during the 1980s and 1990s. Lovelock conceived of the Gaia theory which proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings to create a self-regulating system maintaining the conditions for life on the planet. Drawing on conversations that the artist had with Lovelock around a year before he died at the age of 103, the film explores what Ghadiali refers to as, ‘new ways of living on the 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 young 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 at the University of Exeter. During the film, footage of the flowing Dart river is shown as Ghadiali enters the water three times repeating the title of the work to an improvised melody.
Originally commissioned by The Box, Plymouth the film Planetary Imaginationexamines connections between climate change and migration. Using The Box’s film and television archives, Ghadiali weaves together interviews with renowned science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke (author of 2001: A Space Odyssey), 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, South Devon in 1917 and the significant transatlantic explorations conducted by the Pilgrim Fathers and Francis Drake. Planetary Imagination engages with questions of how, in an age of environmental crisis, we relate to shared histories to imagine sustainable futures together.
The three film works are accompanied in the exhibition 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 and histories of the most climate-vulnerable, and sheds light on the colonial violence that underpins climate catastrophe.
A public programme day will coordinate with the exhibition on 12 April, with a keynote presentation by the eminent decolonial feminist scholar Francoise Verges. Sensing the Planet completes a trilogy of lectures that Verges has delivered for Radical Ecology (led by Ashish Ghadiali) since 2023. Other confirmed elements of the public programme include a conversation with Joy Sleeman, director of research at the Slade School of Fine Art UCL and acknowledged authority on British Land Art and a participatory session of Radical Ecology’s ongoing research into Dream Ecologies.
The exhibition programme will also include coordinating art activities for the community.
Gemma Girvan, THG Curator, commented,
I first met Ashish at the Against Apartheid exhibition he curated at KARST in Plymouth. From our very first conversation, I was eager to collaborate with Ashish. I'm now delighted to present his first solo exhibition, showcasing his works under one roof highlighting the themes of racial and environmental justice.
I'm looking forward to the public engagement programme we have lined up to accompanying the exhibition. I’m also excited about the potential of this exhibition to generate collaboration and meaningful discussion.
Sensing the Planet: Ashish Ghadiali
22 March to 26 April 2025
Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm.
- Private View: Saturday 22 March, 3-5pm
- Public Programme Day : Saturday 12 April, 11am - 5pm
