Behind the monsters and mutant bodies in Natasha Tontey's work

Natasha Tontey was sitting in a meeting room inside Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) when SBS Indonesian met her for an interview.

Tontey wore a neon green synthetic fur coat that glowed against the grey walls. Underneath it, a white shirt with a patterned tie, blue trousers, and a pair of worn-out sneakers. Cat-eye sunglasses the same colour as her coat rested on her nose. Her appearance refused to be quiet, much like her work.

A few steps from where she sat, her multi-part installation "Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre" was on display as part of the exhibition "Syncretic Wilds". In the work, Tontey explores the relationship between the Minahasa people and the black macaque, known as yaki in North Sulawesi, through film, sculpture, costumes, and audio.

The exhibition is part of the Kindred People festival at Monash University, which celebrates Indigenous cultures from around the world, and runs from 18 July 2026 to 19 September 2026, with free admission.

This is not Tontey's only exhibition this year. Her work is also on show at Ateneo Veneto in Venice, Italy, and Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, USA, Tontey told SBS Indonesian. All the works on display are different from one another, she said.

Tontey creates moving images that are always connected to installation, sound design, costumes, performance, and writing, she said. At MUMA, for instance, parts of her film sets take the form of sculptures displayed in the gallery space.

Tontey's attention is not drawn to beauty. She looks for figures considered threatening: witches, monsters, rebel women, animals, mutating bodies.

All of these figures, Tontey said, are deliberately constructed by the state, religion, science, or media as something to be feared and controlled. Tontey described this theme as manufactured fear. She finds knowledge and new possibilities in these marginalised figures, Tontey added.

And her inspiration comes from unexpected places, Tontey said. The Indonesian television series Jin dan Jun and Suzanna horror films, for instance, have shaped the aesthetics of her work.

Tontey's path to the visual arts did not begin at art school. Tontey joined an extracurricular photography class at high school, then attended a workshop at the Antara Photojournalism Gallery, she said. Tontey's final assignment received a poor mark because it was not considered photojournalism.

But it was there that Tontey met several figures, including Oskar Motuloh and Firman Ikhsan, who showed her that photography could be a medium for visual art, she said.

But Tontey's interest in the visual world was planted long before that. When Tontey was around five years old, she visited the Vatican. Tontey's mother took her to see Michelangelo's David and the ceiling paintings of the Sistine Chapel, she recalled.

Beyond that, her late mother's interest in fashion and the visual world, Tontey said, instilled in her a love for art.

Her Minahasa identity has shaped much of how Tontey works. Tontey grew up in a close-knit Minahasa family and still speaks a Minahasan language, she said. But Tontey approaches her culture with criticism as well as pride, without romanticising it, she added.

Shortly after the interview with SBS Indonesian, the exhibition began. Tontey walked visitors from one room to the next, stopping in front of each part of the installation to explain her work––about the relationship between the Minahasa people and the yaki, about the costumes that originated from her film sets.

Exhibiting overseas is something she enjoys and wants to keep doing, Tontey said. For her, every exhibition outside Indonesia is a chance to bring Minahasa stories to audiences who have never heard them, she added.

Listen to the full interview on the SBS Indonesian podcast.