Emii Alrai
Lures
Carl Freedman Gallery is proud to present Lures, a solo exhibition by Scottish‑Iraqi artist Emii Alrai.
Lures unfolds as a sculptural landscape shaped by excavation, myth and inherited memory. Alrai transforms the gallery into a shifting terrain, where fragments appear caught between ruin and reconstruction. Drawing on the aesthetics of archaeology and museology, her installations consider how objects become vessels for power, belief and cultural inheritance.
The exhibition centres on the idea of the “lure”: an object that attracts, deceives or promises access to something beyond reach. Through vessels, architectural forms and sculptural interventions, Alrai explores the relationship between desire, geography and the body. Across the gallery, clay, steel and carved polystyrene form a landscape of partial monuments, reliquaries and speculative artefacts. Sculptures resembling unearthed vessels, carved landscapes and provisional structures operate as decoys, suggesting authenticity while revealing their constructed nature.
Running throughout the exhibition is a tension between romance and violence, explored through heart burial, a practice particularly prevalent during the Crusades. Reserved largely for royalty, nobles and high-ranking figures, it involved the hearts of crusaders being preserved and returned from the Holy Land or elsewhere in Europe for burial at home, while others sent their hearts onwards to Jerusalem when unable to complete the journey themselves. These movements created a network of human remains crossing geographical and spiritual borders. Alrai is drawn to the allegorical charge of the heart as the imagined centre of desire and longing, physically attached to a desired place and forging connections to land through memory and devotion. Some vessel forms draw on Alrai’s research into the ornate containers used to house buried hearts, elevating human remains through ornamentation and care.
Together, these elements create an environment where the past feels both present and fabricated, in which myth, memory and material evidence continually blur.
Preview
Saturday 26 September 2026, 5-7pm
Dates
27 September – 8 November 2026
About The Artist
Emii Alrai is an artist whose work spans material investigation in relation to memory, critique of the western museological structure and the complexity of ruins. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her work operates as large-scale realms built in relation to bodies of research which concern archaeology and the natural environments objects are excavated from. Her practice weaves in oral histories, inherited nostalgia and the details of language to question the rigidity of Empire and the power of hierarchy to interpolate the static presence of history. The installations physically weave together hand built clay vessels which are patinated to look like ancient artefacts, steel braces and polystyrene hewn into amorphous landscapes.
Mimicry and theatricality are at the heart of the work, with forms covered in gypsum, sand, tar and various pigments to create monumental environments that replicate the ideas of a romanticised past and the histories of archaeological excavation. In this material exploration in relation to bodies of research, Alrai’s practice allows for conversations around memory, nostalgia and language to surface critiquing current structures of rigidity and how these may stem from the lasting shadow of imperialism. Beyond merely critiquing or reproducing these structures, the work’s bending of time and space imagines ways in which to go forward in our understanding of history, its retelling and its romanticism and opens dialogue with the ways we engage history in our construction of the future.
