Joseph Beuys creation of a biographical identity through his interpretation of his history is here suggested through the seemingly randomly but deliberately scattered logs that form/constitute his installation. This artistic evocation oif the imaginative creation of a pattern of meaning out of the disparate. apparently undirectly connected forms of experience is juxtaposed with the random arrangement of the divinatory instruments of ifa-the ikin or divining nits-to evoke the character of Ifa divination as a similar means of interpreting the larger significance of biographical incidents and the patterns of biographical progression with the aid of imagistic forms evoked primarily through language and secondarily through sculpture, as Beuys has done through his installation.

The paradoxes of experience when viewed in the light of memory, where unanticipated convergences emerge, and apparently trivial facts are understood to suggest a pivotal significance, is evoked by he image of the eyes and face of Eshu presiding over the divination process. This transformative understanding of experience if reinforced by the images of the spirals which border the tray, described by Lawal in relation to the associated iconography of ogboni art,as evocative of transformation. the spirals could be understood to suggest not only the transformations that emerge in human experience through/in the passage of time but the transformations that emerge in/through the contemplation of this experience, a contemplative process that abstracts the experience from the realm of the purely concrete and removes them to the level of abstraction where they can be examined in suspension from the temporal and spatial matrix in which/through which they emerged.

This Opon Ifa, therefore, could be understood to embody/realise an understanding of the hermeneutic process that emerges in ifa divination as well as its relationship to the human activity of reflection upon experience.