LAS Art Foundation (Berlin) and Amos Rex (Helsinki) present a new commission by Natasha Tontey at Ateneo Veneto on the occasion of Biennale di Venezia – 61st International Art Exhibition. Tontey’s multimedia installation relays the story of a 1950s female resistance fighter in Indonesia. Exploring physical and chemical transformation, Minahasan symbolism and contemporary military imaging, the work addresses the sovereignty of bodies, cultures and land.

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.

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.