Natasha Tontey’s “Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre,” 2024-25
POSITIONED AS AN IMMERSIVE and filmic installation, Natasha Tontey’s first institutional show presents a challenging conundrum that intertwines existentialism with primatology, asking how we can unpack the coexistence of humans and primates without reiterating the reductive discourse of greenwashing politics. In what ways can Indigenous spirituality add nuance to human perspectives on our evolutionary cousins? Despite weighing in on such fraught matters, Tontey’s works speak through a playful language of dark humor: Within Museum MACAN’s green-walled, scantily lit space loom a leather armchair resembling a monkey’s face, a bulbous flesh-pink carpet that invokes corporeal vulnerability—human and simian alike—and a grand-scale video projection that viscerally references Tontey’s vested interests in youth culture and critical fashion while still delivering quirky shots and provocative monologues about the intricate links that bind both humans and apes.
A phantasmagoric mixture between Italian giallo horror and a Hollywood sci-fi B movie, Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre, 2024, revels in the suggestive power of nonlinear narratives. The opening scene, in which a silver-tinted cage looms in the smoky dark, illuminated alternatively by green then red stage light, sets the ambience while introducing the film’s four protagonists—a quirky primatologist duo named Imago Organella and Xenomorphia, and two hybrid macaque-men. Standing against a backdrop of smoky jungle, the primatologists lament the enduring plight of scientific uncertainties, before rescuing the caged macaque-men. The four then embark on an adventure that unfurls in reverberating fragments: a Jell-O banquet with quirky utensils, a makeshift broadcasting station where Imago delivers a dramatized soliloquy on human-macaque commonalities, a ballroom party where characters jam to dangdut—a genre of Indonesian folk music—and, finally, a tranquil boat ride into the pink horizon, which humans and macaques alike appreciate.
Throughout the film, Imago and Xenomorphia’s dynamics foreground layered facets of humans’ and macaques’ overlapped developmental paths: While Imago’s matter-of-fact tone contemplates similar evolutionary traits that unite the two species, such as the aesthetics and politics of hair in both female macaques and human women, Xenomorphia, whose monkey tail is accompanied by her tight corset and key-shaped nails, theatrically breaks into tirades about science’s anthropocentric view and other beings’ rights to agency, calling for a radical detachment from our belief in human supremacy and the forging of newly empathetic perceptions of primates. The duo’s call to action is further solidified by a particular scene where the two macaque-men muse on the choreography of life, which transcends any species division. Emerging through an oversize monkey’s butt, the creatures pose a philosophical question: What if the world began from the bottom up, instead of the top down? As the macaque-men speak eloquently about the evolutionary kinship beneath our anatomical differences, their sophisticated thoughts contrast with their monkey-like yelps and mannerisms, further entreating viewers to imagine a utopia where species boundaries blur. Together, Tontey’s quartet disrupt the preconceived hierarchy in the human-primate relationship and prompt us to envision more equal forms of interspecies relation.
In reality, the relationship between Tontey’s ancestral Minahasan people and the crested black macaques (yakis) is rather tricky. While they play the role of honorable ancestors in Minahasan mythologies, the yakis are also seen as vermin who often raid the villages in search of food. Tontey’s film actors who played the yakis are in fact reenacting Mawolay, a Minahasan ritual carried out by shamans donning monkey costumes to deter the rampaging macaques. To further complicate matters, the yakis are now protected as endangered species in Indonesia, thus rendering any act of self-defense against them illegal and heightening the yaki-Minahasan tension. Tontey’s filmic installation thus gestures toward the “environmental sustainability” politics (reiterated by NGOs) that often disregard the beliefs and customs of Indigenous communities, but it also highlights the mutual fate of the yakis and the Minahasan: exotified internationally yet marginalized locally.
Adding to the philosophical deliberations in her poetic screenplay, Tontey employs eccentric costumes and props to visually ground her film’s thematics. In addition, Tontey has playfully incorporated elements of Minahasan cultural fabric and xenofeminism into her costume design. Xenomorphia’s lacy corset-suit draws inspiration from adventure-gaming characters, particularly Lara Croft, her tail—made of hair clippers—bearing resemblance to a Minahasan tribal sword. Similarly multilayered, Imago’s cowgirl aesthetic references Spanish vaquero culture—one of the colonial forces that annexed the Indonesian island of Sulawesi—while her shirt, reading “Primate Visions,” echoes the exhibition’s ethos of seeing through the yakis’ eyes. Through subtle hints embedded in costume and set design, Tontey has channeled her people’s modern cosmology into the institutional space of Museum MACAN.
As the multiple narratives of humans and macaques continue to amplify and interweave, I stand quietly in front of one of Tontey’s props. A human-shaped (or macaque-shaped?) figure made of acrylic-painted latex. Bulging raw-flesh limbs of indeterminate species. I wonder, would I be able to tell if this simulated body is human or yaki, should I see it lying somewhere? If I make assumptions in either direction, what does it say about my biased perception? How can we form genuinely empathetic connections with another species, given how genetically close we are? Why are we so invested in human supremacy that we cannot recognize the macaque within ourselves? What hierarchies need to dissolve in order for new visions to come forth?
For Tontey, her journey to address such questions through the filmic medium might have brought her to grapple through ambiguity, a radical departure from the norms of certainty and transparency that we hold dear. A view from the bottom up, that foregrounds marginalized perspectives, that normalizes complexity as the catalyst for unexpected connections. As the film draws to a close, Imago is seen playing a violin to the tune of “Take Me Home, Country Roads”—a favorite among Minahasans—as the sky over the Sulawesi ocean blooms into various shades of pink. On a boat that harbors both humans and yakis, one of the macaque-men turns toward the camera and waves, while the other fastens his pondering gaze on the horizon. Beauty and nature move the spirit, regardless of species taxonomy.
