Muscle memory: Natasha Tontey’s wild Venice installation explodes perceptions of Indonesian history – The Art Newspaper

Visitors to Natasha Tontey’s new installation at the historic Ateneo Veneto will, upon arrival, find themselves ascending a ramp to come eerily close to the contorted bodies of Jacopo Palma il Giovane’s 17th-century Cycle of Purgatory, painted on the coffered ceiling—and cast in a dramatic red light. It is a fitting entry point to Tontey’s own, very different, depiction of spiritual and physical transformation, played out on a screen below by a cast of absurdly muscular, mutant warriors.

The Phantom Combatants, commissioned by the Berlin-based LAS foundation and Helsinki’s Amos Rex, is a reimagining of the story of Len Karamoy, a woman who was a member of Permesta, a CIA-funded resistance movement active in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, from 1957 to 1961. In Tontey’s telling, Karamoy embarks on a journey of retribution against her lover, a character named the Photographist, whose defection from Permesta weakens the group in its fight against the central government. The warriors are taking part in rituals that see them variously morph, strengthen and multiply throughout the 22-minute run-time.

But to apply a narrative description to the work would be to miss the point: it is, more broadly, a campy, fantastical exploration of autonomy and resistance that relates as much to the present day as it does to the era it is focused on. The third in Tontey’s series Macho Mystic Meltdown, it draws on Indigenous belief systems, contemporary technology and the aesthetics of B-movies to pose questions that have you thinking long after you step back into the light of day.

Karamoy, Tontey says, has been overlooked in the history books, which have focused instead on Jan Timbuleng, her husband and the muse for the film’s Photographist character. During her field research for the project, however, Tontey found that Karamoy came up again and again in conversations with veterans and elders, in which the warrior came across like “a supernatural being”. A key aspect of the film, the artist explains, is to re-centre Karamoy’s perspective.

Another is to interrogate the “tensions” within Indonesian history and culture. Tontey, like Karamoy, is a member of the Indigenous group the Minahasans, whose ancestors, she explains, were “non-heteronormative and non-Darwinian”, but which over time has been taken over by hyper-masculine ideas and aesthetics. Tontey plays on this not only through the comically muscular appearance of her warriors, but also through their attire and behaviour. The characters’ cowboy hats are a nod to the clothing worn by members of Permesta—whose leaders were Minahasan. In one scene, meanwhile, Karamoy is shown brandishing a pair of silver pistols, Spaghetti-Western style, with flames crackling menacingly behind her.

A major takeaway from The Phantom Combatants is there are no simple answers when it comes to the past, and Tontey has fun with the flexibility this offers. Her project draws on her experience growing up playing video games, she says, as well as the visuals of sinetron (Indonesian soap operas), the sci-fi television series The Twilight Zone and the films of Terry Gillingham, in particular the Monty Python series. This art style also makes room for the experimental nature of her decision to cast her neighbours in the film, and shoot on a low-budget. “It’s not like Hollywood filmmaking where everything has to be polished,” she says.

There are serious themes present in the film, however. “One of the important ideas is the Minahasan idea of ‘Sito Timo Tumoto’, roughly meaning ‘humans live to enlighten/liven up others’, or ‘be kind to everyone’,” Tontey says. Another is the idea of mutual aid. One of Tontey’s characters is the shaman, a “cosmic witch-like presence who refuses heroic masculinity” and who shows that “the body does not need to perform strength in order to be powerful”.

Tontey takes a more solemn approach to technology too, in a way that aligns closely with the missions of both LAS Foundation and Amos Rex. The artist, with the help of software on her phone, incorporated technologies used in military surveillance, such as infrared and hyperspectral imaging, into her film, where they serve as both artistic and thematic tools. “I was interested in visual and political systems, how they detect, scan and classify, sometimes misread, the body,” Tontey says. “I wanted to think about what happens when this technology encounters something that refuses to be fully captured, a combatant, a spirit, an ancestor, a memory”.

It is in these ways that the incredibly prescient nature of Tontey’s practice comes to the fore. We live in a time, she explains, of warfare and technological violence. Her work, in her own words, “might become a way to speak about these unfinished struggles, as well as anti-colonial resistance, the violence of nation-state, the invisibility of women in military history and the possibility of imagining power differently”.

That this film plays out in the storied setting of the Ateneo Veneto, which was originally a confraternity church and today serves as an academy for science, literature and the arts, adds its own layering. By bringing visitors close to the paintings of Il Giovane, and bathing them in red, Tontey wished to activate them, subvert the traditions of looking at art and heighten the sense of liminal space and the encounters between different “ghosts”.

It is a way of working that points to where artistic practice is headed next, says Kieran Long, the director and chief executive officer of Amos Rex. “For me, the future of art is hybrid in this way; it cannot be confined now to a system of art production that starts in an art school and ends in gallery. It’s multi-disciplinary, and exists in a public space in a particular moment.”

Bettina James, the chief executive officer of LAS Foundation, adds: “Natasha incorporates different technologies so playfully, and her work also speaks so much to where we are in our society with technology, how it is changing our lives and even our bodies. This commission is so perfect, in the way it refers to the times we are in right now.”