Weave your way around giant sculptures and imaginative hunting arenas at Eastside Projects in Birmingham. Artist Emii Alrai has created a curious world of medieval hunting traps and museum-like scenes for her latest solo exhibition. The Courtship of Giants combines myths and legends with giant artefacts, arrows and the romanticism of wounds.
As part of this exhibition, you’ll find a maze-like structure with dead ends and corridors to navigate around. Along the way you’ll see giant wounded sculptures held captive on metal armatures. This strange world has been created using woven cardboard and plaster walls to make an immersive environment that’s ready to entrap and ensnare. Steel arrows pierce walls and sculptures alike, anchoring limb-like objects in space.
Alrai’s show conjures up images of fallen knights and hunted animals, with coveted bodies hit by Cupid. This romanticised violence of the museum reminds us that hunting, capture and collecting are underpinned by long bloody histories of conflict and colonisation.
Emii Alrai’s work is informed by inherited nostalgia, geographical identity and post-colonial museum practices of collecting and displaying objects. It focuses on ancient mythologies from the Middle East, alongside personal oral histories of Iraq. She weaves together narratives by forging artefacts and visualising residues of cultural collision. Often working on a large scale, she creates sculptural installations that recall museum displays and dioramas.
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When: On until 16th April 2022
Where: Eastside Projects, 86 Heath Mill Lane, Birmingham B9 4AR
£: Admission is free (please pop on a mask and observe social distancing around the gallery)
More info: eastsideprojects.org
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