Emmanuel Eni

Biography

On 23 September 2006 Emmanuel Eni smashed one of his own sculptures in front of an audience: a twenty-ton elephant of concrete on an iron and steel frame. He had given the elephant’s hide an earthy colour, as if the animal had just climbed out of a mud bath. After its exhibition the sculpture was to go to a future sculpture park, but the park never materialised, no other home could be found, and the artist turned its destruction into an action, “Junking of the Elephant”, devoted to ecology and nature.

The elephant, as Eni explains, is for him the mother of all animals: without elephants, he believes, nature itself will cease to exist.

Eni was born in 1967 in Igbanke, in mid-western Nigeria. He attended Igbobi College in Lagos, then studied art at Auchi Polytechnic (diploma 1984) and sculpture at the University of Benin, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1991. After that he continued his studies at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, until 1993 or 1994 according to different accounts. His first exhibitions came while he was still a student: “Art for Life” at the National Museum in Benin City (1987), an exhibition in Johannesburg (1990), sculpture and drawings in Nairobi (1991), “Parables” at the National Museum in Lagos (1992).

Since the mid-1990s he has exhibited mainly in Germany and the United States: “Creation Story” at the Albertus-Magnus-Haus in Freiburg (1994), “Parts of Clay” at the Monroe Center for the Arts in Hoboken (1996), “Water Burns” in Vienna (2005), “History of Love” at the Galerie im Prater in Berlin (2006). In 2005 he taught sculpture as a visiting professional at the Rhode Island School of Design, and later taught sculpture, new media and performance at the Weißensee Academy of Art in Berlin. He works in bronze and terracotta, and in recent years increasingly with recycled and everyday materials. A separate strand of his work is called “New Light Painting”; Eni regards himself as its inventor and as the holder of a patent on it, which is hard to verify. His play “Death of the Curator” was staged as an installation-performance at the Grassi Museum in Leipzig, the Saxon ethnographic collection (2006), shown in a programme running parallel to documenta 12 in Kassel, and published in Berlin in 2007. The installation “Africanize” was seen at the same Grassi Museum and in Hamar, Norway. At the 2006 Dakar Biennale he showed the installation-performance “Israel and Palestine”; he returned to this theme later as well, in Berlin and Minden.

Another of his titles, “Blackman in European Kitchen”, serves both as his pseudonym and as the name of a performance. Under it Eni has appeared at the Goethe-Institut in Lagos, at the Iwalewahaus in Bayreuth and at the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin, and in 2017 a book of the same name was published. In 2011, for a sculpture symposium in Syke near Bremen, he made the seven-metre “Leaf Spirit Totem” of Douglas fir with terracotta and mirror glass.

Eni writes poems and tales. The collection “Masquerade Undressing” came out in England in 2005, and the anthology “Kindonkind”, with six hundred poems, in 2021. He reads his texts as performances, for example “Ear as a Long Road” at a poetry festival in Berlin. In 2021 his paintings and sculptures were shown in Marktredwitz and Wunsiedel in Bavaria.