Natasha Tontey
Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre
Museum MACAN
Jakarta
Nov 16, 2024–Apr 6

Everything in the jungle can be your friend or your foe. This principle is well understood by the human inhabitants of Minahasa, a region in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. They practice this in their interactions with the indigenous yaki, black-crested macaques that are at once revered and feared, worshipped yet deemed pests, considered an endangered species but devoured for ritualistic purposes. The ritual in question, mawolay, requires the locals to wear monkey costumes and befriend the yaki to deter them from raiding villages and stealing crops. If the ritual doesn’t take place, villagers believe, the macaques get restless.

This paradoxical relationship between humans and yaki forms the crux of Minahasan artist Natasha Tontey’s exhibition at Jakarta’s Museum MACAN, “Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre,” which was commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary and curated by Denis Pernet. Tontey, who is based between Jakarta and Yogyakarta, was inspired by the desire to reconnect with her roots and revisit Minahasan culture and traditions. This has led her to delve into larger questions about evolution, the missing links between humans, yaki, and our ancient primate ancestor.

Set in a dystopian future, the main film Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre and related works (all 2024) center around a fictional narrative about two primatologists who free a pair of yaki from captivity. The film then follows the primates’ bizarre escapades, which include attending a peculiar dinner where they indulge in a dessert that makes them immortal—Tontey’s allusion to a practiced ritual in which, as part of a feast, Minahasans consume a dish made from yaki. As in her previous works, Tontey uses vernacular references and iconography from contemporary Minahasan culture in addition to drawing from traditional practices such as the mawolay ritual. In other scenes in the film, they visit an experimental biology facility where they converse with various characters about human evolution and how the study of primates intersects with human society. Many of these on-screen personas are in fact exaggerated, fictionalized versions portrayed by the actors who play these roles in the real-life ritual, ensuring a sense of authenticity.

The film’s characters dress in cowboy attire and ape-like costumes, and in one scene perform a line dance. “Cowboy culture is embodied in the Minahasan people,” explains Tontey. What began several years ago as a personal inquest into her Minahasan ancestral heritage has transformed into a full-fledged existential prompt about upending the anthropocentric framework in which humans operate, conveyed through speculative fiction.

Time collapses in Tontey’s surreal world. Shorter moving-image works featuring close-ups of the actors’ contorted facial expressions play on small TV monitors embedded within costumes and props from the film sets, which Tontey forms into a sculptural installation surrounding the two main films. Rustic silver costume jewelry is additionally embedded into these installations, resembling those from bygone eras and suggesting a future when humans will be viewed by another advanced species as the equivalent to the yaki.

The exhibition’s visual impact was immense. Tontey has crafted a surreal world that presents alternate possibilities for the future and reflects her own theatrical flair. A black, fur-lined chair with a cracked leather seat and a tongue sticking out resembles a yaki. Dark fantastical outfits featuring corsets, cowboy hats and boots, and ape-like costumes (as seen in the film) are chained and suspended from metal rods—in reference to the yaki being kept captive in the film. One macaque’s torso is replaced by a phone keypad, reflecting enmeshment of traditional folklore and contemporary technology. The hard structure of the corset, and the steely, industrial feel of the installation’s infrastructure contrasts sharply with the softness of the black shaggy fur and oozing pink flesh-like backdrops that are incorporated into various installations.

Dichotomies define Tontey’s visual language and aesthetic, materializing in the exhibition in myriad ways. Her works embody the interplay between the industrial and natural, masculine and feminine, and, most visibly, the grotesque and gorgeous. The scale, detail, and tactility evoke reactions so visceral and often discomfiting that viewers find themselves confronted by their own bandwidth for both beauty and the macabre.

Tontey is particularly interested in the Minahasan people’s overlooked matriarchal history, and consistently refers to it throughout the show. The pink, furry, glittery hyperfeminine aesthetic looms over a steely, industrial, and more violent and masculine one. Legend has it that the first Minahasan person in existence was a woman born from stone, and the region was ruled by matriarchs until the 7th century CE. This was marked by a switch from female to male leadership. “But when I got to Minahasa, I saw that everything is hypermasculine and I wanted to resist this,” Tontey explained.

The second single-channel film features Minahasan men dressed up as yaki. They recall a message from their ancestors: if warriors want to succeed in life and war, they must be respectful to women. The two primatologists in the main film were also female. Here, Tontey plays with the idea that male macaques appear to be strong, aggressive alpha leaders, but it’s the female macaques who control the resources and protect the pack.

Whether it is the patriarchy or our anthropocentric framework, Tontey invokes the tension between two contrasting perspectives, prompting us to think about coexisting more harmoniously and equitably with other living beings.

Aaina Bhargava is a writer and editor based in Hong Kong.

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