Artist Talk: Ilish Thomas

01 November. Free entry.

Saturday 1 November, 11am-12.30pm

On the opening weekend of The Crystal Palace, join us in the gallery for a conversation between artist Ilish Thomas and curator Jane Wallace.

All welcome, no RSVP needed.

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The Crystal Palace is an exhibition that traces The Crystal Palace Theatre in Maungawhau, Tāmaki Makaurau, an old cinema bought into by the artist’s grandfather. Since its closure some years ago, the building has given way to grief, colliding wishes, the property market, time, and the elements.

Through the figure of the chudel, female ghosts that appear in Gujarati folklore, Ilish Thomas enters The Crystal Palace and encounters a theatre that, like the chudel, is suspended beyond chronological time. Unable to touch the ground, chudel are known for troubling their surviving kin, and can access places that the self might not. Bringing together moving image, sound, and textile installation, The Crystal Palace follows the ghost to soften boundaries between structures both built and familial.

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Ilish Thomas is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, whose practice explores the complexity of South Asian diasporic identity through themes of whakapapa, memory, grief, loss, and belonging. Working across textiles, video, audio, and other archival strategies, they engage modes of storytelling and oral histories as tools for cultural navigation and mediation. Central to her work is a focus on ‘in-betweenness’ and of generating new political imaginaries.