Emii Alrai is an artist working primarily in sculpture and installation, whose practice explores materiality in relation to memory, archaeology, and the lingering structures of empire. Her work interrogates Western museological frameworks and the ways history is stabilised, classified, and romanticised, particularly through the language and aesthetics of excavation and ruin.

Alrai’s installations function as immersive environments, constructed through sustained bodies of research into archaeology, natural landscapes, and the sites from which objects are extracted. These works weave together hand-built clay vessels patinated to resemble ancient artefacts, steel supports, and polystyrene carved into amorphous terrains. Oral histories, inherited nostalgia, and linguistic fragments are embedded within these material systems, allowing questions of power, hierarchy, and historical authorship to surface.

Mimicry and theatricality are central to Alrai’s approach. Forms are coated in gypsum, sand, tar, and pigments, creating monumental yet unstable architectures that echo the romance of archaeological display while quietly undermining it. By bending time and scale, her work critiques the rigidity of imperial narratives and exposes how the past is continually reassembled in the present. Rather than simply reproducing or dismantling these structures, Alrai’s practice opens speculative space for reimagining how history is told, remembered, and mobilised toward the future.

Alrai has presented numerous solo exhibitions across the UK and internationally, including Capture (Towner Eastbourne, 2025), River of Blackstone (Compton Verney, 2025), A Lake as Great as its Bones (Maximillian William, London, 2024), Lithics (Quench Gallery, Margate, 2024), Passing of the Lilies (Jerwood Solo Presentations, London, 2021), and The High Dam (The Tetley, Leeds, 2020). Her work has also featured in major group exhibitions at institutions such as the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds Art Gallery, British Museum touring exhibitions, CCA Glasgow, Bold Tendencies, and Warehouse 421, Abu Dhabi.

Her work is held in significant public collections including The British Museum, the Arts Council Collection, the Government Art Collection, The Hepworth Wakefield, Leeds Art Gallery, and the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery.

Alrai holds an MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies and a BA in Fine Art (International) from the University of Leeds, and studied at the École Supérieure d’art et de design Marseille-Méditerranée. She has undertaken numerous international residencies, including Villa Medici, Rome; Wysing Arts Centre; Triangle Astérides, Marseille; and Pilchuck Glass School, USA. Her awards include the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award, Jerwood New Work Fund Award, Knotenpunkt Artist Award, and the FUAM Graduate Art Prize.