1. Introduction

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2. Biography

Tanka Fonta is a composer, visual artist, philosopher, whose work spans more than three decades of inquiry into perception, sound, image, and consciousness. From early exhibitions in Cameroon and Canada to major projects across Europe and Africa, his practice continues to evolve as a deeply intuitive and layered exploration into vibrational languages, cultural repositories of knowledge systems, the compositional and symbolic architectures that shapes and influences the fields of human understanding.

His artistic trajectory is not a path of formal repetition but a dynamic unfolding—one shaped by questions rather than answers, thresholds rather than definitions. His orchestral compositions, large-scale murals, writings, and broadcasts are portals into a philosophy of being that rejects the merely representational. Instead, they invoke the unseen, the felt, and the unspeakable through sound, gesture, and visual philosophical metaphors and allusions.

His work has been exhibited and presented at major institutions including:

• Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin – where his 130-meter mural The Cosmogenic Interconnectedness: “How Did We Talk Before the Roman Alphabet?” stands as an invocation of pre-linguistic perception and vibrational storytelling.
• SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin – where his contributions have extended into sonic reflections and acoustic interventions for tributes to Julius Eastman and Halim El-Dabh, and collaborations with Oscar Murillo’s Frequencies Project.
• Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg – where his paintings have been exhibited in dialogue with global questions of identity, memory, and the aesthetics of non-belonging.

Fonta’s lectures and seminars have been shared at different institutions worldwide. He is also the co-founder of Radio Future Africa, a sonic platform and spaces of philosphical inquiries exploring the intimate fields and processes of sound, perception, and the psychological ecologies of being.

His compositions are published by CWJEF Music Publications and distributed internationally by Theodore Front Musical Literature (North America) and Otto Harrassowitz (Europe). His works are archived in the music libraries of Harvard, Yale, University of Virginia, Bayreuth University, and others.

More than biography, what unfolds here is a field: an evolving constellation of works, reflections, and inquiries — a body of work that listens as much as it speaks.

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São Paulo Biennial – Selected Works

All images courtesy of the artist. © Tanka Fonta 2025

Synopsis: São Paulo Biennial Project – Philosophies of Being, Perception, and Expressivity of Being

“Not all travellers walk roads…” — With this evocative proverb at its core, this multidisciplinary work unfolds as a philosophical, vibratory, and aural/visual exploration of the human experience beyond the conventional boundaries of the thinking machinery, its derivative and constructed languages, and thought forms.

At the 36th São Paulo Biennial, the totality of the works unveils as a large-scale mural and immersive orchestral compositions installed as listening stations—drawing from collective human repositories, wells, and fountains of wisdom, intuitive knowing, and non-orthodox fields of understanding. Through six major picto-sonic compositions and nine interwoven orchestral compositions, recorded and pressed onto vinyl, the project bridges modulated visual philosophical languages and musical invocations into a unified language of perception and becoming.

Rather than simply depicting Brazil or any nation-state, these works reflect on the psychical, psychological, and mythopoetic landscapes of all human experience—the sacred, the journeys into the event timelines of what has been, the vanished, the yet-to-be-voiced. It is a cosmogenic mapping of life’s murmurings and echoes, inscribed in symbols, pigments, and frequencies. Here, the viewer is not a passive spectator but an invited participant—called to listen, to feel, and to traverse the inner terrain of being.

This work is not merely an installation; it is an invocation. A call to awaken dormant intelligences, to unearth that which is not yet known—the unexplored vibrations—and to behold the invisible compositional architectures of being, spirit, and story.

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HKW Berlin – The Cosmogenic Interconnectedness

The emergent mural work on the old blue circle within the foyer at HKW—130 meters in length—is a picto-sonic composition unfolding in nine thematic movements. These orchestrations manifest as symbolic visual, sonic, and poetical imprints. They aggregate and integrate the non-verbal languages from across various fields of intuitiveness, receptivity, and subtle perception—those dimensions that reach beyond what our analytical minds and acquired languages are structured to decode.

In this context, the mural taps into deeper strata of temporality, drawing from enfolded collective repositories and embedded organic dictionaries. These are not just symbolic abstractions but living, consolidated intelligences—woven into the mythopoetic textures of our collective heritage.

We are not instructing but inviting—asking the viewer and perceiver to enter into participation. This is not art as object, but art as dialogue. A space of immersion into organic languages of the unfamiliar, where evocative mysteries and the murmurings of the cosmos speak in frequencies rather than conclusions. This is a storytelling practice—visual, sonic, and metaphysical—that integrates alternate, non-Western philosophical inquiries, excavated from deep time. It gestures toward the collective stories of humanity: its consciousness, its migrations, its rhythm of becoming, and the multidimensional plains of its existence.

Titles of Paintings / Visual Compositions

• The Cosmogenic Interconnectedness
  Subtitled: “The Picto-Sonic Dialogues I” – “How Did We Talk Before The Roman Alphabet?”
• Epistemic Interrelatedness I
  Subtitled: “I Have Eaten of the Sun II”
• To This Earth We All Belong
  Subtitled: “Di Kontri Meeting II”
• There Never Was A Beginning Nor An Ending
• Dictionary of Non Time, Time Transcoders & Transformers
• Vibrations of Memory & Deep Time
  Subtitled: “The Meditative Movements of Perception & Understanding”
• The Thought Transformers I
  Subtitled: “Do I Need To Look Like You To Be Considered As A Living Being?”
• Has The Stream Flowed?
• The Dawn Incantations I

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Kunstverein Hannover – The Cosmogonic Awakenings

The Cosmogonic Awakenings & Perceptivities of Being

For the Kunstverein Hannover, Emmanuel Tanka Fonta created a series of abstract works that delve into the interconnected architectures of perception, reality, and consciousness. Titled The Cosmogonic Awakenings & Perceptivities of Being, the series explores the mind’s shifting awareness, its capacity to translate experience into intelligent abstraction, and its dialogical relationship with the unseen movements of reality.

• The ineffable interconnectedness of all life
• Organic knowledge systems, both molecular and mythopoetic
• Biological, symbolic, and psychological circuitry of perception

Through these themes, Fonta reveals the intimate interweaving of thought, emotion, and the lived energies of existence. Paintings such as Transcendent Night & The Self in Perceptivity I & II investigate the threshold between inner and outer states of being, while the series The Cosmogonic Awakenings II, III, and IV expand into symbolic inquiries on the origins of perception, memory, and life.

The closing compositions, Chants & Cantos of an Exalted Land I & II, evoke a lyrical merging of the biological and the philosophical. They reflect the vibrational languages of unity—beyond name, beyond form—restoring art as a contemplative portal into the unseen workings of existence.

Credits: All artworks © Tanka Fonta 2024. Photography by André Germar.
Exhibition link

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Goodman Gallery – Extended Thought Forms

Overview
Extended Thought Forms was unveiled at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, as a pivotal moment in Tanka Fonta’s lifelong visual and philosophical practice. Long held in reserve, this powerful body of work emerged not through institutional demand but as a necessary flowering of an inner, sustained inspirational current—what the artist refers to as the Independent Flow. These compositions were kept deliberately under wraps for years, awaiting the right constellation of context and resonance before being released to the world.

Each work within this series radiates its own resonance field—a mnemonic, poetic structure evoking archetypes, energetic maps, and symbolic grammars far deeper than language alone can express. They are not mere paintings; they are memory-chants, thresholds, and vibrational manuscripts.

Philosophical and Visual Framework
The series draws upon the meditative and philosophical terrain articulated in Fonta’s text Extended Forms of Thought II. These are not illustrations of ideas—they are thought itself, compressed and precipitated into visual phenomena. Each piece becomes an image-field: a condensed vocabulary of perception, a sensorial map that gestures beyond cognition and into the architecture of being.

They function as visual scores, symbolic cartographies, and sonic archives—encoded through layered abstraction, rhythmic geometry, and intentional gesture. Within them reside languages of vibrational resonance, symbolic memory, ancestral intelligences, and the biological grammar of perception.

These works do not describe—they invoke. They do not depict—they transmit. Fonta’s Extended Thought Forms operate as ontological transmissions—composed not to explain, but to awaken. They reach toward those inner domains where awareness senses itself, and where symbolic knowing precedes thought.

Works Presented
The exhibited series includes a constellation of mixed-media compositions—combining pigment, textile, graphite, and gestural mark-making. Each painting is a vessel of metaphysical and vibratory layering. Though individual titles and formats may vary, the unity lies in their philosophical grounding and energetic density.

The works featured in this exhibition are among the most sought-after and emblematic in Fonta’s visual oeuvre. They mark a turning point in his pictorial language and are considered by collectors and scholars alike to be core articulations of a larger cosmogenic inquiry.

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Yaoundé Exhibition – Goethe Institute & National Museum

Incantations, Invocations & Evocative Entanglements is a major philosophical, visual, and sonic body of work exploring the psychological, cultural, and metaphysical ramifications of German colonialism in Cameroon (1884–1918). Created as part of Tanka Fonta’s deep response to historical erasure and contemporary silence, this project activates a new visual and poetic grammar to trace the layers of impact—visible and invisible—left by colonial imposition on the identities and intelligences of the colonized.

Structured across 15 thematic movements, the work unpacks the sonic, architectural, linguistic, and psychic sedimentations that persist long after formal occupation. Through symbolic compositions, vibratory scripts, poetic recitations, and orchestrated scores, Fonta creates an immersive language that speaks directly to the deep-time memory fields of African consciousness. Each movement acts as a mirror, not only of what was imposed, but of what was lost, transformed, and now reclaimed.

The project integrates:

• 14 visual compositions exploring altered perceptions, impositions of thought, and ontological violence.
• 9 musical compositions structured as invocatory chants and rhythmic reimaginings of suppressed cultural forms.
• 8 lyrical poetic recitations that animate the symbolic scripts and deepen their emotional and conceptual resonance.

From *The False Sun II* to *Themes and Idioms of an African Market*, the works unmask the colonial architecture of perception and reconstruct new channels of understanding that reconnect the present to ancestral time. This is a counter-archive—one composed not from institutional records but from resonant remembering, from internal languages of resistance, survival, and resurgence.

This section is part of a larger ongoing inquiry into memory, perception, symbolic reparation, and the restoration of erased cosmologies through artistic intelligence.

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Quantum Dance Series – Invocation Idioms and the Embodied Symbols of Perception

“Is the observer an actual reality, or are things simply in a state of resonance?”

The Quantum Dance Series is a long-evolving visual research into the nature of perception, consciousness, and symbolic resonance—expressed as precipitated thought forms, unfolding in layered mnemonic idioms. Created over several decades and first published in 2017, these works synthesize intuitive knowledge systems, perceptual fluidities, and ontological patterns through intricate symbolic compositions rendered in acrylic and ink across large canvases and paper.

The series explores how memory, mythology, and perception become interconnected languages—speaking across time and non-time, presence and absence, observer and the observed. Each symbol is not merely decorative but a self-contained quantum unit: a biographical entity with resonance fields that extend into cultural, psychological, and cosmological terrains.

Colour becomes frequency. Form becomes code. Each work is a symbolic event timeline, gesturing toward the invisible mechanics of perception, thought, and memory. The paintings act as meditative manuscripts—illuminated fields for intuitive participation rather than interpretation.

Themes include:
– The Invocation of Hypnagogic Memories
– The Emergence of Holographic Thought Forms
– The Resonance of Ancestral and Cosmic Perceptivities
– The Idioms of Time and the Unfolding of Identity

Quantum Dance is not merely a series, but a foundational visual and sonic architecture within the artist’s broader cosmogenic practice—a living dictionary articulating an evolving grammar of perception. These works have continued to shape and inform the artist’s orchestral and aural works, compositional grammars, philosophical inquiries, and expanded vocabularies of symbolic and vibrational languages.

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Matrix of Consciousness – Visual Dictionaries of Thought & Time

Excerpts: “The Numinous Themes & The Evocation Idioms II” 2015)

This landmark body of work—“Matrix of Consciousness”—comprises over 50 paintings created between 1994 and 2014, and stands as one of Tanka Fonta’s most expansive and conceptually rich visual explorations. First exhibited in Montreal and Vancouver in the mid-90s, these paintings delve into the evolution of consciousness, the symbolic idioms of perception, and the interplay between psychological, spiritual, and cosmological processes.

The series includes iconic titles such as “The Idioms of Evolutionary Time,” “Identity & Space,” “Midnight Stanzas,” and “Visions & Ideograms.” These are not simply abstract works; they function as symbolic blueprints, compositional thought-fields, and mnemonic structures designed to express forms of time, memory, and perceptual transformation. In many of these works, layered symmetries and rhythmic color fields intersect with angular or flowing gestures—evoking time-transcoding architectures and cognitive constellations that bypass linguistic representation.

Philosophically rooted in the cosmogenic and intuitive orders of African knowledge systems and enriched by encounters with contemporary abstract traditions, this series probes the threshold between subjective feeling and objective structure. The visual idioms presented here appear both organic and mathematically orchestrated—reminding us that within the matrix of being, consciousness is not a fixed entity but a vibrating, evolving, and shape-shifting field.

Described by early reviewers as “pictorial libraries of intelligence” and “compressed philosophical scores,” these paintings continue to be collected internationally and were recently republished as part of Tanka Fonta’s retrospective archives.

This section in the portfolio honors their importance not only as early works but also as foundational visual maps that shaped the later sonic and vibrational language architectures found throughout the artist’s multidisciplinary journey.