LAS Art Foundation (Berlin) and Amos Rex (Helsinki) present a new commission by Natasha Tontey at Ateneo Veneto on the occasion of Biennale di Venezia – 61st International Art Exhibition. Tontey’s multimedia installation relays the story of a 1950s female resistance fighter in Indonesia. Exploring physical and chemical transformation, Minahasan symbolism and contemporary military imaging, the work addresses the sovereignty of bodies, cultures and land.

The Phantom Combatants and the Metabolism of Disobedient Organs is Tontey’s most ambitious work to date. It is commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and Amos Rex, two future-oriented art institutions founded within the last ten years to support new artistic practices in a technological age.

The Phantom Combatants is presented at Ateneo Veneto, Venice’s academy of science, literature and the arts, located in San Marco in a sixteenth-century building. On arrival, visitors ascend a walkway into an environment of video, sound, light and sculptural elements. At the centre of the installation, Tontey’s video reimagines the story of Len Karamoy, a combatant in Permesta, a political movement in North Sulawesi fighting the centralised rule of the Indonesian government from 1957 to 1961 with support from the CIA. In Tontey’s retelling, Karamoy is not a single historical figure but a mythic presence, multiplied into the ‘Phantom Combatants’ through a chorus of young troops. Her mutant body — with three breasts and exaggerated muscles — emerges as a flamboyant emblem of self-determination, whose disobedient organs metabolise ancestral and insurgent forces.

Natasha Tontey is a Minahasan artist based in between Jakarta and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her artistic practice predominantly explores the fictional accounts of the history and myths surrounding ‘manufactured fear.’ In her practice, she observes any possibilities of other futures that are projected not from the perspective of major and established institutions, but a subtle and personal struggle of the outcasted entities and beings. Her recent exhibitions include solo show at Auto Italia, London, UK (2022). And selected group shows and screening at 34th Singapore International Film Festival, 57th Karlovy Vary International Film Fesival (2023), Singapore Biennale (2022); De Stroom Den Haag (2022); GHOST;2565, Bangkok, Thailand (2022); Protozone8 Queer Trust, Zürich, Switzerland (2022); Arko Art Council, Seoul, Korea (2022), Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea (2022); Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2021); transmediale, Berlin (2021); Performance Space 2021, Sydney; Other Futures, Amsterdam (2021); Singapore International Film Festival (2021), Kyoto Experiment 2021; Asian Film Archive, Singapore (2021). In 2020, she received the HASH Award from the ZKM, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and Akademie Schloss-Solitude. She was a fellow for Human Machine of the Junge Akademie at Akademie der Künste Berlin 2021-2023.