Tanka Fonta’s artistic practice centres on the expressive and perceptual dimensions of the human mind and how they materialize in our everyday lives. As a selftaught artist, philosopher, and composer, he moves effortlessly across several fields, including painting, poetry, and sonic compositions, producing works that often inextricably inhabit these multiple realms. For Not All Travellers Walk Roads—Of Humanity as Practice, Tanka Fonta presents The Infinite Ontologies, a sitespecific horizontal mural created for the balustrade of the institution’s façade. In this piece, envisioned as the concluding chapter of the earlier work Philosophies of Being, Perception, and Expressivity of Being presented at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, the artist leans into the awakening of spring and the transition into summer as a metaphor for the dynamic and fluctuating nature of humanity. Drawing from several mythologies, philosophies, and oral traditions, the mural, developed across eight visual movements, echoes the Bienal’s curatorial proposition of conjugating humanity as a practice rather than a fixed condition and explores our variegated ontologies—or ways of being—expressed through existence. Welcoming several audiences as they enter the HKW premises, The Infinite Ontologies, in its essence, invites visitors to embrace multiplicity as a common denominator and to transcend the societal categories imposed upon us. As Fonta alludes to in an artistic statement on this piece, ‘Perhaps we all need to recognize that compassion is the animating force without which nothing, not even life, is possible.’

WORK IN THE EXHIBITION:

The Infinite Ontologies (2026), acrylic on canvas, 170 × 7500 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Commissioned by Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 36th Bienal adaptation in Berlin commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)