ARCHIVAL GHOSTS with Emii Alrai / Richard Maguire / Hannah Regel

29 Feb 2024 7-9pm

Overview

Artists Emii Alrai and Richard Maguire will be in conversation with writer Hannah Regel about bodies in archives, dreams, hallucinations and lullabies as writing tools, and how these ghosts haunt their work.

Emii Alrai is an artist and trained museum registrar 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. Weaving 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. Clay vessels, gypsum forms and steel armatures punctuate the labyrinth-like spaces Alrai creates, mimicking museum dioramas and romanticised visions of the past.

Richard Maguire’s work draws heavily on archives, making exquisite, minute drawings and prints which each contain a veiled narrative. Following the trail of those who he feels a kinship with – such as actress Merle Oberon, photographer Lionel Wendt, historian Indrani Chatterjee, Bloomsbury artist Duncan Grant – Maguire layers and reworks archival images as a method of discussing the violence of colonialism. Through his work, he also offers the possibility of healing through fabulating and speculating counter-histories to this violence.

Hannah Regel was born in Nottingham and now lives in London. From 2012-2019 she was the co-editor of the feminist art journal SALT. Hannah has two published collections of poetry, When I Was Alive and Oliver Reed (both Montez Press, 2017 and 2020).
 

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