My Father, Myself and the Ancestors : Engaging Bruce Onobrakpeya's Thanksgiving Dance
Abstract A journey through the associative possibilities of artist Bruce Onobrakpeya's Thanksgiving Dance , (plastocast relief, 2015), in relation to the theme of ancestor relationships across varied world views. My Father, My Grandfather and I Sometime after my father's death in 2000, Joseph Ohomina, my teacher in Ifa, a system of knowledge and divination most closely associated with the Yoruba, divined on my behalf. He declared that my father was guiding me, according to the insights Ohomina described himself as gaining from the seemingly random arrangement the opele, the Ifa divination instruments, assumed when he cast them, a randomness believed in Ifa hermeneutics, Ifa interpretation theory, to be influenced by the powers behind the oracle, which uses those patterns in communi...