The Contemporary Rooms at EoTLA will be installing two suites of works comprising photographs, drawings, sculptures and videos by artist Leo Asemota. The works are organized from The longMarch of Displacement (2008) and Count Off for Eo ipso (2012), live art works from two distinct phases in The Ens Project.

The Ens Project is a work of art Asemota has assiduously been evolving since spring 2005. Focused on the human head as its expressive weight, the Project is informed by Edo people of Benin’s art and ceremony to the Head, Victorian age of invention, exploration and conquest and Walter Benjamin’s essay A Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (1936). The Project comprises three phases: First Principles (2005 – 2008), The Handmaiden (2009 – 2012) and Eo ipso, which is ongoing.

The longMarch of Displacement (2008) concluded 6 stages that make up the Project’s First Principles. Offering historical insight on Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 in counterpoint with the British sacking of Benin Kingdom, the performance featured three characters known as Agents of the Union in a procession along the arc of the Victoria Embankment from Westminster Bridge to Blackfriars Bridge en route to St. Paul’s Cathedral where they carried out a sequence of actions on a plaque commemorating her.

Count Off for Eo ipso (2012) was conceived as a prologue to Eo ipso, the last component in The Ens Project. The multi-site performance involved one sequence that began at St. Paul’s Cathedral in tandem with another in the Tanks at Tate Modern where they merged to reach its point of highest development. Using the Project’s 7-year history and Tate’s conversion of architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s Bankside Power Station as its conceptual basis, the live art work was an enactment of Hï, 14 completed alternating lifecycles in the transfiguration of a creative being called The Handmaiden who Asemota characterizes, using the architect as an avatar. Each lifecycle was intimated through a cast of Tate Collective members that worked with Asemota to devise the performance as well as in the project’s core materials: palm oil, coal, orhue (kaolin), coral, iron, brass and hibiscus flower.

Contemporary Rooms at EoTLA
Ground Floor, 210 Hornsey Road,
London N7 7LL

Leo Asemota is a London based Nigerian born artist. A survey of The Ens Project’s First Principles was presented at New Art Exchange, Nottingham (2011). Exhibitions of different stages in the project include The Handmaiden Part 2 at Centrum Beeldeende Kunst, Amsterdam (2010); The Handmaiden Part 1 at Metal, Liverpool (2010); ens memoralis a live art work at National Portrait Gallery, London (2008) as well as in the group shows One’s History is Another’s Misery at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (2009) and Autocenter Berlin (2009) and Emerging Discourses: Performance and Mimicry at Bodhi Art, New York (2008)

PUBLIC PROGRAM
Stephenson Lecture Theatre
British Museum
Thursday 24 October 2013 from 2:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Leo Asemota will be in discussion with curator Chris Spring, this event explores key themes in Asemota’s ‘The Ens Project’, an ongoing multiphase work. The discussion will begin with a screening of films from Asemota’s live artworks in the Tanks at Tate Modern (2012) and St Paul’s Cathedral (2008), followed by a procession of characters from the performances draped in the ‘Sash of Fulfilment’ marking the end of their involvement in Asemota’s project.

In association with British Museum and Tate Collective with support from Africa Studies Association UK on their 50th anniversary. Free but booking essential. Please visit the British Museum website for more information: www.britishmuseum.org

PUBLICATION
An eBook for iPad will be published by EoTLA  to complete the program of discussion and exhibition, available at iBook Store in December.

www.eotla.com