“Misfortune’s Wealth” – by Leo Asemota
Leo Asemota’s exhibition “Misfortune’s Wealth” at Estate of the Leo Asemota – EotLA, London, UK, is part of his The Ens Project. The illustrations, drawings and aphorisms represent the loss of inner contact between divinity and human personality because of the substantial growth of society. The exhibition can be viewed until January 20, 2007 at the venue.
The idea of ens germinated in 1994 during the The Great Benin exhibition at the Museum of Mankind in London, and has been there with Asemota ever since. Ens, which in Latin means the essence, started taking shape in 2005. First to come was the project’s insignia – an inscribed circle inside an equilateral triangle. Asemota then assigned a source of his ideas to each angle of the triangle. In Asemota’s own words, “Misfortune’s wealth essentially is reason advanced and sources reconciled to define the inscribed circle”. According to the artist, since the circle contained the essence of his ideas, they should appear in more clarity in form. The circle represented a figurative, metaphoric, and conceptual form of the work.
Leo Asemota’s work focuses on head worship that the Edo people in Benin practiced, the British conquest of the Royal Kingdom of Benin in 1897, and Walter Benjamin’s work named The Artwork in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility. The Igue ritual of head worship performed annually is the supreme rite of the people there, which ensures power and continuity of the Oba Dynasty. The ritual is deeply immersed in the belief that the human body is a sculpture that is animated by the soul. It is the soul that protects and guides the physical head (temporal self).
Asemota’s work consists of drawings in coal and Kaolin on paper except his work The Field of Mortal Activity; Time Memory drawn on an iron sheet. These materials are symbols of historical events. The coal and iron symbolize the might of Britain, as these minerals led to the British Industrial Revolution. Iron for the Edo people stands for god Ogun worshipped by the craftsmen and warriors alike. Kaolin, a ritual chalk, is considered the symbol of purity and harmony. Asemota’s work revolves around these raw materials and the ideology they represent.