View of “Natasha Tontey: Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre,” 2024-25, Museum MACAN, Jakarta. All photos: Natasha Tontey/Audemars Piguet.
“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.”
Read the full article at Artforum.
