Colors, shapes, sounds – the Berlin artist Tanka Fonta in the House of Cultures

2023-06-18 13:08:30
HomeBerlinColours, shapes, sounds – the Berlin artist Tanka Fonta in the House of Cultures

In the newly designed interior of the House of World Cultures (HKW), visitors are invited to a round trip with colors and sounds. A portrait of the artist

Harry Nutt

Tanka Fonta brings his mural to the House of World CulturesAlexander Steffens/HKW

Circles, triangles, fish-like structures, abstract figures – the newly designed rotunda of the House of World Cultures (HKW) seems to set an entire cosmos in motion, in which the recognizable and the mysterious communicate with one another. The musician, artist and radio broadcaster Tanka Fonta, who was born in the Cameroonian highlands, was commissioned by HKW to make the central interior of the so-called pregnant oyster vibrate, although he had to adapt to the rather static architectural features – windows, columns, asymmetrical surfaces. Last but not least, it was also a technical challenge. For several months, Tanka Fonta climbed onto the scaffolding during the conversion phase of the HKW and left there in contemplative restlessness an overall view of his artistic work and put it together again.

What now appears to be stamping the HKW with its playful elegance can also be understood as a programmatic intervention in which Fonta gives priority to the variety of shapes and colors over discursive determination. He himself calls his work, which includes further works with titles such as “The Cosmogenic Interconnectedness ‘How Did We Talk Before The Roman Alphabet'” or “Epistemic Interrelatedness ‘I Have Eaten Of The Sun, II'”, an image-sound -Composition of nine thematic movements.

There is no doubt that the composer is speaking here, although he never dwelled very long on the requirements of stylistic rigour. This can be heard impressively on the album “Portraits of Nights & Days”, on which Tanka Fonta, starting from the traditional music of his mother culture, soon digresses into modern orchestral sound spaces and from there returns to different guitar variations. Most of the instruments featured on the album were recorded by Tanka Fonta herself; Adrian Janke has taken over the accompaniment on the cello.

From the spirit of music

When Tanka Fonta recorded the album in the late 2000s, he also performed more often with the formation Black Heritage, which is dedicated to Afro-Soul, traditionals and funk and focuses on the musician who was born in Madagascar and grew up in Senegal and singer Mfa Kera. At the same time, he also began to devote himself intensively to painting, which, despite its strict awareness of form, came across as brightly colored and aroused associations with the record cover of the South African jazz musician Abdullah Ibrahim, who probably released one of the most influential jazz albums with the album “African Marketplace” at the end of the 70s produced in his time.

Tanka Fonta, Epistemic Interrelatedness I: ‚I have Eaten Of The Sun II‘, Ausschnitt aus The Cosmigenic Interconnectedness: ‚How Did We Talk Before The Roman Alphabet‘, 2023, Sylvia Wynter Foyer.Foto: Alexander Steffens/HKW, Courtesy of the Artist

The association with Abdullah Ibrahim, who initially began his career under the name Dollar Brand, may seem naïve, perhaps even clichéd and offensive. However, it clarifies the associative range in which Tanka Fonta moves, or: beyond which he strives experimentally. His passionate musicality can be found in his shapes and colors. The mural in the HKW can be read as a visual score, says Tanka Fonta, or simply as a journey through an ever-surprising world of shapes between geometry and mythology.

However, his approachably demanding compositions cannot be fully grasped without an understanding of his intensive preoccupation with traditional African music. For example, Tanka Fonta never lets a subway ride through Berlin go by without listening to West African high-life music from the headphones, which is not least the Nigerian source of inspiration for the development of the influential Afrobeat by Fela Kuti and his band Egypt 80 has been.

detours to art

A multi-talented artist, Tanka Fonta has written prose and poetry, some of which are included in the companion book to the album Portrait of Nights & Days. A lonely song, perhaps from a mother, says the title track, “pierced the early stillness of the moment.” Based on concrete perception, Tanka Fonta created structures in his mural for the HKW that, as he says himself, are “orchestrated as visual, auditory and poetic traces in evocative symbolic languages.”

Tanka Fonta tanztAlexander Steffens/HKW

As a radio producer, however, Tanka Fonta also knows that simple and communicative forms of expression are important. He is one of the co-founders of the Internet broadcaster Radio Future Africa, which has made it its mission to spread interesting facts about African art and culture. In an interview with the English editors of the Berliner Zeitung, Tanka Fonta revealed how he got into art in the first place. Because his family was of the opinion that one could not make a living from art, they sent him to study botany in the Nigerian city of Benin City. But it was home to a thriving arts scene at the time, which spoiled his diligence forever. Tanka Fonta later went to Vancouver, Canada, where he met his German wife Djorna, with whom they first came to Stuttgart in 2003 and a little later to Berlin. And so the mural in the HKW also tells of the journey through the world and the cultures.

On Sunday, June 18, there will be one at HKW Workshop with Tanka Fonta give. Start 3 p.m