Study for Rice Vessel

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Government Art Collection

Emii Alrai’s drawing Study for Rice Vessel imagines a particular type of vessel, as an artefact. Vessels have been used since time immemorial as containers, to hold and preserve. They are also metaphors for the human body as a container. ‘We all carry sediments from the past through our own bodies,’ Alrai reflects, ‘passed through generations, like ancestral memory.’ Emii Alrai is interested in how European or ‘Western’ museums show historical artefacts from other cultures. A key interest in her work is in exploring how the removal and display of these artefacts impacts on identities of both, the nations who display these objects and the diaspora from West Asia or the ‘Middle East,’ where many of the artefacts she is interested in originate. She is curious about what this does to the object itself, what is ascribed to it in the memory of those whose heritage is tied to the areas these artefacts are found in, how it becomes defined in the institutions that it is displayed in; and the ways in which it is seen by others.

Emii Alrai was born in Blackpool and received her BFA from the University of Leeds, which included a year at the École Supérieure d’art et de design Marseille-Méditerranée in France. She went on to an MA in Gallery and Museum studies, also at Leeds, graduating in 2018. She has had solo exhibitions at The Grundy, Blackpool (2023); The Hepworth Wakefield; Iniva, London; Eastside Projects, Birmingham (all 2022); Threshold, Leeds (2021); Jerwood Arts, London (2021) and The Tetley at Leeds 2020). Her work has been included in group exhibitions most recently at the Centre of Contemporary Art Glasgow (2024); Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton (2023); Contemporary Arts Centre, Cincinnati, US (2023); Bluecoat, Liverpool (2022); McIntosh Gallery, Western University, Ontario, Canada; and Assembly Point, London (2021).

Places

Subjects

still life

Materials & Techniques

paper (as artists material), ink, Ink drawing

Artist

Emii Alrai (1993 - )

Title

Study for Rice Vessel

Date

2021

Medium

ink on rice paper

Dimensions

height: 40.0 cm; width: 40 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Iniva, March 2022

Provenance

Institute of International Visual Arts, London UK; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 25 March 2022

GAC number

19056