Interview: Emii Alrai on ‘Guardian’ and Rebuilding the Temple of Babel on Calton Hill

Hot off the back of a residency at Tracey Emin’s Victoria House, Emii Alrai chats to us from her family home in Edinburgh. She is preparing to install the latest iteration of Guardian, her latest sculptural feat, on Calton Hill for Edinburgh Art Festival.

Though created with modern materials, a process Alrai attributes to ‘forgery’ and ‘trickery’, this piece holds the gravitas and grandeur of its historical forbearers to create a gargantuan but fragile, modern relic.

Through her work and the lens of institutional critique, Alrai questions the power and narrative of ruins and artefacts and the colonial acquisition and presentation of history.

Your work explores contested power, relics, and mythology. What draws you to these themes and does it hold any personal relevance?

There’s loads of different ways of answering that, but I have a background where I worked in museums for a very long time. I came across so many objects and was in a lot of museum collections. I was just in the kind of graveyard of thousands and thousands of objects every day, and I kind of became this weird undertaker and almost embalmer of these objects.

I think there was this kind of overriding sense of where and why are these objects here? Like, why do they belong in this place? And why is it that these aren’t the ones that we ever get to see? So, I got really interested in this idea of hierarchies and thinking about what is it that becomes a valuable object, and where does something get assigned its power? It extends outwards to the way that we’ve just been educated about what history is given priority or precedence over others.

I grew up in Scotland. My family are Iraqi, and there was also this kind of double-faced hiding of oneself when you were younger because you didn’t want to be racially abused or aggravated. Which is obviously deeply sad. There wasn’t really space for you to just be yourself within your own cultural remit here because it just wasn’t seen as something that was of value, and that’s obviously changed over time.

I think, that sort of thing rings true to a lot of people who live within the diasporic body or experience, is this idea of, where do we also place ourselves within a kind of hierarchy of power and knowledge, and how do these kind of histories reflect on these experiences that have become fragmented from their homelands as well?

What are the mythologies and influences for this particular piece?

The Lamassus guarded the entry to the Temple of Babel. They’re monumental bull-like figures: half-human, half-horse. They have various different points that consistently change, so either you’ll see four legs or from another angle you’ll see five, and the eyes will look down at you and will consistently change depending on where you’re placed.

So when I was developing this piece, I was really interested in this and the monumentality of these objects. I was really obsessed with this idea of how they were transported from Iraq to the UK and them kind of being broken up or not being broken. Some [monuments] were, some weren’t. I was interested in the relationship to the work Guardian, almost trying to rebuild something that has the same kind of monumental stature but kind of abstracting something that could be multiple things at once. I wanted that to really sit within the sculpture.

On the whole, it would just be this idea of a monument that’s eroded over time, splintered, and fractured. That also started to speak into the way that the sculpture is sort of built in various sections that are bolted together, and that creates this formal sculpture.

That’s also mimicking the ways archaeologists would have brought over these huge monuments and pieced them back together here – this kind of weird Frankensteining. I also like this idea of a guardian guarding a city and particularly with this piece going on Calton Hill, it fits in quite nicely within that space as something that watches over a city.

I thought about your work as a modern relic. Where do you see Guardian going or existing after its time in Edinburgh?

It’s a funny one because I think I’d love to see the work re-exhibited again or edited so it becomes more of a permanent display. But we’d have to change the material of it, because you can’t have that outside forever.

There’s something that would be interesting to see how it develops over the course of this viewing, and the mythologies that might get added to it. That feels like it’ll maybe lead it to the next space. I already love the fact that it was on the roof of a car park, and now it’s going to be on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, a totally different type of landscape.

I think I’m kind of interested also in how it might accumulate all these different types of terrains. I hope it enjoys its summer on Calton Hill.

Guardian is at Calton HIll, Edinburgh, from 14th August to 30th August

Photo credit: Damian Griffiths