Emii Alrai

Emii Alrai (b. 1993, UK) is a visual artist and trained museum curator. Her work is based on a material investigation of memory – as inherited nostalgia – a critique of the Western museological structure and the complexity of ruins. Working mainly in sculpture and installation, Emii Alrai’s practice brings together archaeological research and the natural environments from which these objects are extracted. Forms in clay, gypsum and steel armatures punctuate the labyrinthine spaces created by Emii Alrai, mimicking museum dioramas and romanticized visions of the past.

 

Using the Villa Medici plaster collection as a starting point, Emii Alrai will explore the origins of the myths and legends evoked there. By focusing on motifs that depict armed struggle, war and the natural world, and by studying the drama in which these scenes are represented in the plaster casts, she questions the tension between fiction and reality of heroism and violence in relation to the building and fall of empires (both ancient and modern). Drawing on earlier research into Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction to reconsider lost histories and narratives in favor of what Le Guin calls “stories of progression”, which are primarily stories of violence, Emii Alrai will spend time studying, collecting and drawing plants from the Villa Medici estate. Working closely with this research and material, Emii Alrai will focus her residency on drawing and developing sculptural works in plaster that mimic the plasters found at the Villa, testing new material textures and experimenting with the physical manifestation of altered histories and world-building narratives.