Amos Rex (Helsinki) and LAS Art Foundation (Berlin) present a new commission by Natasha Tontey at Ateneo Veneto on the occasion of Biennale di Venezia – 61st International Art Exhibition

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.

Bettina Kames, CEO of LAS Art Foundation and Kieran Long, CEO of Amos Rex say: “We are thrilled to jointly present a new commission by Natasha Tontey in Venice. The Phantom Combatants speaks to the extraordinary times we are living in, marked by uncertainty amid shifting political and technological landscapes. This major new work, the most ambitious by the artist to date, offers a timely reflection on agency in times of conflict, connecting a specific struggle for autonomy to wider questions of power today. The Phantom Combatants exemplifies our shared dedication to enabling such artists to take bold, imaginative positions in proposing visions of the future.”

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.

The narrative unfolds as a tale of betrayal and justice: when Karamoy’s lover defects to the central government, she and her Phantom Combatants enact retribution. Guided by a shaman, they train and perform rituals of transformation that chemically and spiritually strengthen them.

Karamoy, like Tontey, is Minahasan, an indigenous group based in North Sulawesi whose layered identity includes both Christian and animist beliefs. Ateneo Veneto’s coffered ceiling, visible above the installation, depicts the Cycle of Purgatory, painted by Jacopo Palma il Giovane in 1600, and illuminated in a red wash by Tontey. An incorporated part of the Minahasan belief system, purgatory also reflects the liminal state of unresolved political struggle explored by Tontey in The Phantom Combatants. 

The work uses the playful aesthetics of campy B-movies, a mix of DIY and CGI effects, and imaging technologies including the latest quantum ghost imaging that uses photons to produce images, as well as remote sensing method LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), 3-D modeling photogrammetry techniques and thermal cameras — invoking the ways through which territory and bodies are measured, mapped and militarised. The Phantom Combatants moves between poetic narration and heightened theatricality, featuring highly stylised costumes and props.

Marking the third instalment in Tontey’s Macho Mystic Meltdown series (2025–26), The Phantom Combatants centres feminist and indigenous perspectives in rethinking resistance. The work makes a timely appeal to arguments for autonomy and self-determination, asking the visitor to reconsider sovereignty — not only of territory and knowledge, but of the body itself — in a world where all three remain sites of contested power.

Natasha Tontey says: “Through this project, I try to listen to the quieter tones of history — the minor keys where fragments of memory, mourning and ritual continue to resonate. These subdued frequencies, often drowned out by louder narratives, are where I find gestures of survival, care and imagination that persist in spite of violence. At the same time, this minor knowledge also opens up the possibility of developing a technological future rooted in other perspectives — not necessarily human — more closely attuned to cosmological knowledge.”

In 2027, The Phantom Combatants will return to Helsinki for an exhibition at Amos Rex.

About Natasha Tontey

Natasha Tontey is a Minahasan artist and researcher based in Jakarta and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her practice encompasses film and video, performances and installations and often explores alternative futures from the perspectives of marginalised entities. Tontey has exhibited her work at venues internationally, including solo shows at Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (2026); Museum MACAN, Jakarta (2024–25); and Auto Italia, London (2022). She has also shown her work in group exhibitions at venues including the MUNCH Triennale, Oslo (2025–26); 18th İstanbul Biennial (2025); 14th Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2025); Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul (2022); Singapore Biennale 2022; Ghost 2565, Bangkok (2022); and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2021). Her films have screened at the BFI London Film Festival (2025), FIDMarseille (2025) and the Singapore International Film Festival (2021, 2023, 2025). She is the recipient of the Han Nefkens Foundation — Loop Barcelona Video Art Production Grant 2024, and the HASH Award from ZKM | Karlsruhe and Akademie Schloss-Solitude, Stuttgart in 2020. From 2021 to 2023, Tontey was a fellow of the Human Machine programme at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Tontey has been selected for participation in the 59th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh and Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement, Tunis (both 2026). 

About LAS Art Foundation

LAS Art Foundation is a non-profit organisation founded to support new artistic practices in a technological age. LAS works with artists, thinkers and institutions around the globe to catalyse ideas and develop innovative projects and experiences. We explore topics ranging from quantum computing and outer space to artificial intelligence, ecology and biotechnology — illuminating the intersections between art, science and the latest technology. Our programme comprises installations and performances, as well as learning formats, publications and research projects. Based in Berlin, LAS has staged projects at locations around the city and internationally since its launch in 2019. 

To date, LAS has commissioned and presented work by artists including Refik Anadol, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Ian Cheng, Libby Heaney, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Pierre Huyghe, Robert Irwin, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Lawrence Lek, Josèfa Ntjam, Laure Prouvost and Marianna Simnett. In 2025 LAS Art Foundation won the European Commission’s S+T+ARTS 'Grand Prize – Innovative Collaboration' for its Sensing Quantum programme.