Oluseye: The Ancestral Now

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Oluseye with his work, “Orí mi pé,” installed at Art Gallery of Ontario (photo by Craig Boyko, AGO)

Nigerian-Canadian artist Oluseye first made headlines for work such as Black Ark, a 12-foot-tall immersive sculpture that was part of the Luminato Festival and was on view at Ashbridges Bay in Toronto in 2022. Black Ark provoked visitors with questions about Canada’s role in slavery; Canada’s shipyards contributed more than 60 ships used in the TransAtlantic slave trade. 

Black Ark takes the form of both a chapel entrance and a ship’s hull. One can enter from the “freedom side,” which is 12 feet tall, but must bend, crawl, or make oneself smaller to exit at the other end, which is just under five feet. Inside the hull, polished aluminum distorts and scatters reflections, evoking the disturbing calculus that Black people were sometimes traded for mirrors. 

While his new work, Orí mi pé, doesn’t involve mirrors, it does involve a mirrored aspect that connects the ancestral with the present. The artist’s performance of a Yoruba divination ritual is presented in black-and-white video and mixed-media sculpture. Orí mi pé is Oluseye’s first major installation at the Art Gallery of Ontario. It is on view now through July 2026.

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“Oluseye: Orí mi pé,” installation view at Art Gallery of Ontario (photo courtesy of AGO and the artist)

Orí mi pé took shape at a residency at Instituto Sacador in Salvador, Brazil, where Oluseye developed his practice of merindinlogun. In conversation with AGO’s magazine, Foyer, Oluseye says he arrived with plans to document it but “would instead recreate a dramatized version of the ritual, symbolizing his spiritual journey and featuring some dear friends he made during his trip. This video, along with 16 large bronze cowrie shells resting atop a hand-carved walnut divination tray, make up Orí mi pé.”

In the gallery, the black-and-white video of the performance is circular on screen, harkening both the antique feel of images made with pinhole cameras and the lo-fi aesthetic of 1990s lomography. The artist’s friends emerge on screen gradually, each ringing a bell before casting small cowrie shells on a divination tray. The sensuousness of the cowrie shells being held in their hands is reflected in the circular sculpture directly across the video. In a massive tray made of wood that’s over six feet in diameter, sixteen large shells in varying shades of gold, black, and brown lay on glittering black sand, mirroring the tiny white shells and small tray in the video.

The sense of scale – with the sculpture expanding the scene of the performance – is magical as it projects the ritual onto the real world, doing away with the one-to-one ratio of transactional spirituality. The words spoken in the casting sound like Portuguese and French, but I cannot decipher them. 

Oluseye says he was faced with the challenge of “how to introduce something so precious within contemporary art without giving away its secrets,” and he has done so not only by eschewing explanations in wall texts, but also by the compositional qualities of the video. The artist and friends are glimpsed briefly before the camera settles on the divination tray. Frames are generally cut above the lips, so that the heart is also a space that opens to the ritual, centring a desire to understand with feeling, but also reminding us of the privacy of one’s own heart-centred knowledge and the sanctity of one’s mind. 

In the interview with Foyer, Oluseye says, “Orí mi pé is a Yoruba phrase used commonly by Nigerians but it is actually rooted in something very deep and spiritual. It translates to ‘my head is correct,’ or ‘my head is complete.’ However, it is used colloquially to playfully – or seriously – jab at someone: Orí e o pé, which then means your head is not correct; you are not okay. In Yoruba, Ori translates to head, and we believe that the seat of our spirituality resides in our head; so, to say one’s head is not correct is to say something is not right with their spirit or destiny.”

Orí mi pé joins a chorus of notable Canadian artists reconnecting with ancestral and contemporary spiritual practices such as Erdem Tasdelen and Julian Yi-Zhong Hou, whose work engages with storytelling, divination rituals, and self-creation to challenge the ways we make meaning today, so that the ancestral is also always the now. ■

Oluseye, Orí mi pé, is on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario now through July 2026.

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