Against Apartheid, Ashish Ghadiali (2023) (EMPIRE LINES x Radical Ecology, KARST)

Curator and filmmaker Ashish Ghadiali connects climate science, contemporary art, and activism, cultivating a radical, cultural ecology in the countryside of south-west England, in their multidisciplinary exhibition, Against Apartheid.

As environmental crises disproportionately affect Black and brown communities, and the resulting displacement often racialised, should we consider these states of ‘climate apartheid’? And could contemporary art help to bridge the gap between science and academics, and everyday action guidance? Against Apartheid, a multidisciplinary exhibition in Plymouth, puts these practices, histories, and geographies in conversation, from vast wallpapers charting global warming, to an intimate portrait of Ella Kissi-Debrah, and plantation paylists collected by the Barbadian artist Annalee Davis, linking land ownership in Scotland and the Caribbean from the 19th century Abolition Acts. Other works affirm how historic ecologies of empire – African enslavement, the middle passage, and the genocide of Indigenous peoples - continue to shape our present and future, in the geopolitics of international borders, migration, and travel.

Activist and filmmaker Ashish Ghadiali talks about his work as ‘organisation’, not curation, and how we can resist the individualisation that prevents effective collective political action. From his background in film, he suggests why museums and exhibitions might be better places for screenings than cinemas, outside of the market. We discuss why both rural countryside and urban city landscapes should be considered through the lens of empire, drawing on ‘post-plantation’ and anti-colonial thinkers like Paul Gilroy, Françoise Vergès, Sylvie Séma Glissant, and Grada Kilomba. We relocate Plymouth’s global history, a focus since #BLM, reversing the notion of the particular and ‘regional’ as peripheral to the capital. We explore the wider arts ecology in south-west England, and how local connections with artists like Kedisha Coakley at The Box, and Iman Datoo at the University of Exeter and the Eden Project in Cornwall, also inform his work with global political institutions like the UN.

Against Apartheid runs at KARST in Plymouth until 2 December 2023, part of Open City, a season of decolonial art and public events presented by Radical Ecology and partners across south-west England.

For more, join EMPIRE LINES at the Black Atlantic Symposium - a free series of talks and live performances, celebrating the 30th anniversary of Paul Gilroy’s formative text - which takes place from 24-26 November 2023: eventbrite.co.uk/e/black-atlantic-tickets-750903260867?aff=oddtdtcreator

Part of JOURNEYS, a series of episodes leading to EMPIRE LINES at 100.

For more on Ingrid Pollard, hear the artist on Carbon Slowly Turning (2022) at the Turner Contemporary on EMPIRE LINES.

For more about climate justice, listen to artist Imani Jacqueline Brown on What Remains at the End of the Earth? (2022) at the Hayward Gallery in London.

For more about the Eden Project in Cornwall, hear curators Hannah Hooks and Misha Curson on Uriel Orlow’s Learning from Artemisia (2019-2020).

And listen to the in-conversation with Professor Paul Gilroy, recorded live, in the episode on The Black Atlantic (1993-Now): pod.link/1533637675/episode/90a9fc4efeef69e879b7b77e79659f3f

WITH: Ashish Ghadiali, Founding Director of Radical Ecology and Co-Chair of the Black Atlantic Innovation Network (BAIN) at University College London (UCL). He is the Co-Chair and Co-Principal Investigator of Addressing the New Denialism, lead author on a publication on climate finance for COP28, and a practicing filmmaker with recent credits including Planetary Imagination (2023) a 5-screen film installation, for The Box, Plymouth, and the feature documentary, The Confession (2016) for BFI and BBC Storyville. Ashish is the curator of Against Apartheid.ART: ‘Radical Ecology, Ashish Ghadiali (2023)’.EDITOR: Nada Smiljanic.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.