Tanka Fonta is a composer, artist, author, performer, instrumentalist, poet, researcher, and scholar of African music. Fluent in diverse musical idioms and genres, he often integrates themes and motifs from different musical cultures of the world—a strong and converging point in his works and compositional palette that he describes as the following: ‘The emerging mural work in HKW is a picto-sonic composition of nine thematic movements, orchestrated in evocative symbolic languages as visual, sonic, and poetic imprints. It integrates and aggregates the non-verbal languages of different fields of intuitiveness, receptivity, non-visual awareness, and sensitivity, considering the visible or non-visible phenomena outside the ranges of one’s analytical thoughts and learned languages. We are inviting, proposing, and asking the perceiver to participate, explore, and enter into the immersive language of evocative mysteries and the murmurs of the cosmos. The mural is artistic storytelling in visual and sonic form, integrating alternative non-western philosophical inquiries from deep time, as well as the collective stories of a shared humanity and its journeys and experiences’.

To fully experience the work, an orchestrated anthem will be performed in order to lead the visitors’ auditory senses through Fonta’s visual journey.

Commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), co-produced by Tanka Fonta and HKW, 2023.

Work in the exhibition: The Cosmogenic Interconnectedness ‘How Did We Talk Before the Roman Alphabet?’ The Picto-Sonic Dialogues I, mural (2023), dimensions vary, comprised of 9 elements: The Cosmogenic Interconnectedness ‘How Did We Talk Before the Roman Alphabet?’ The Picto-Sonic Dialogues I; Epistemic Interrelatedness I: ‘I Have Eaten of the Sun II’; To This Earth We All Belong: ‘Di Kontri Meeting II’; There Never Was a Beginning Nor an Ending; Dictionary of Non-Time, Time Transcoders & Transformers; Vibrations of Memory & Deep Time: ‘The Meditative Movements of Perception & Understanding’; The Thought Transformers I: Do I Need to Look Like You to Be Considered a Living Being; Has the Stream Flowed?; The Dawn Incantations I. Courtesy of the artist

Sound performance by Tanka Fonta with Eden Meier and Saliou Cissokho on Saturday, 3 June 2023, 15:00.