Artists borrowing military and industrial imaging technology is not new. Usually the result is cool-toned, serious and a little reverent about the apparatus — point cloud aesthetics, thermal palettes, the visual language of the machine treated as inherently profound.
Natasha Tontey uses the same equipment to make something that looks like a campy B-movie, and the mismatch is the argument.
The work
The Phantom Combatants and the Metabolism of Disobedient Organs (2026) is at Ateneo Veneto in Venice during the 61st International Art Exhibition, on view May 9 – October 25, 2026. It was jointly commissioned by the LAS Art Foundation (Berlin) and Amos Rex (Helsinki), and travels to Amos Rex in 2027.
It’s the third and largest chapter of her Macho Mystic Meltdown series (2025–ongoing) — a multi-media installation of multi-channel moving image, immersive sound design, light, and biomorphic sculptural forms that anchor the narrative in the room.
The subject
Tontey is a Minahasan artist based in Jakarta and Yogyakarta, and her practice builds alternative futures from the perspective of marginalised entities.
The film retells the story of Len Karamoy, a female resistance fighter in 1950s Indonesia who took part in Permesta, a movement opposing centralised government control. Both Tontey and Karamoy are Minahasan, an Indigenous group of North Sulawesi.
Tontey’s Karamoy is a shapeshifter, using biological enhancement, ancestral ritual and invisibility tactics to evade surveillance and domination. The work runs through bodily agency, Minahasan symbolism, and contemporary military technology as a metaphor for self-determination.
The technology, and why it’s used this way
The imaging list is unusual and specific:
- LiDAR remote sensing
- Quantum ghost imaging
- 3D photogrammetry
- Thermal cameras
These are the tools of contemporary surveillance and targeting. Using them to film an anti-colonial resistance narrative is a reappropriation with an obvious logic — turn the instruments of control toward the people they were built to track.
What makes it more than a neat concept is the register. The B-movie framing means the work refuses to be solemn about its own apparatus. Sincere reverence for surveillance aesthetics tends to end up aestheticising the thing it claims to critique; every beautiful point cloud is also an advertisement for the scanner. Playing it as camp keeps the technology in the position of a prop rather than an oracle — something borrowed and misused, not something revered.
The subject helps the argument along. A protagonist whose resistance strategy is shapeshifting and invisibility is, structurally, a character built to defeat exactly the imaging systems the film is shot on. The work’s form and its story are doing the same job.
Go before October 25
This is the practical note. The Venice showing ends October 25, 2026. After that it’s gone until the Amos Rex presentation in 2027, in Helsinki.
For a multi-channel installation with spatial sound and sculptural elements, that distinction matters more than usual — this is not work that survives as a video file. Documentation of an environment you’re supposed to stand inside is a different object entirely.
Related Reading
- The Phantom Combatants and the Metabolism of Disobedient Organs — LAS Art Foundation
- Natasha Tontey — Amos Rex
- Natasha Tontey Recasts the Heroine on Her Own Terms — Frieze
- Muscle memory: Natasha Tontey’s wild Venice installation explodes perceptions of Indonesian history — The Art Newspaper
- Natasha Tontey Unveils New Immersive Installation Exploring Indigenous Resistance — ARTnews
- Shot on LiDAR, a Short Film Examines the Contradictions of Urban Surveillance — Metropolis