Syncretic Wilds: Phasmahammer and Natasha Tontey

Phasmahammer and Natasha Tontey operate in posthuman paradigms, crafting highly sensory performances, films and installations that offer alternative ways of remembering, relating and world-building. The exhibition reflects on global Indigenous histories, bringing together two distinctive strategies of resistance across the Indo-Pacific region through visual art.

United by a playful intermingling of futurism and ancestral cosmologies, Phasmerhammer and Tontey both employ storytelling to propose new imaginaries for living in difficult times. They share a belief in the restorative possibilities of collective art-making with Phasmerhammer framing performance as a form of ceremony and communal healing, and Tontey embracing collaborative traditions of Minahasan culture as a mode of reconnecting to the natural world.

Natasha Tontey is a Minahasan artist based between Jakarta and Yogyakarta whose fantastical video and installation practice entangles ancestral knowledge with pop culture to address environmental decline and cultural alienation. This will be the first major presentation of Natasha Tontey’s work in Australia following following recent presentations during the Biennale di Venezia – 61st International Art Exhibition (2026), and solo exhibitions at Museum MACAN, Jakarta (2024) and Auto Italia, London (2022).

The exhibition presents Tontey’s major multi-part installation Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre. Commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary, the work explores the multi-layered relationships between humans and the natural world, interweaving primatology with speculative fiction through film, sculpture, costume and audio. Drawing on her Minahasan heritage, Tontey examines the complex and often contradictory interactions between local communities and the endangered black-crested macaque, known as Yaki, in South Minahasa.

Phasmahammer, the artistic persona of Justin Talplacido Shoulder, based on Gadigal Country/Sydney,  generates queer Filipinx futurisms through alter personas based on ancestral mythologies. These personas are realised through hand-crafted costumes and prostheses and animated by distinctive gestural choreography. Recent works have explored Philippine folk tales of supernatural beings to draw viewers into experiences of deep time and non-human entities. The exhibition at MUMA will present a newly commissioned immersive installation that draws visitors into an experience of animate plant life and reflects Phasmahammer’s rhizomatic ethics of entanglement.

Tontey and Phasmerhammer both embrace an immersive and performative approach to exhibition-making as a sensory and temporal process of world-building. With Phasmerhammer’s early work emerging from underground queer club and community spaces, and often inhabiting theatre and festival contexts, the exhibition brings their work to new audiences. As an exhibition grounded in performance, installation and embodied experience, Syncretic Wilds continues MUMA’s ongoing research into performance within the museum, developed through the ARC-funded project Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum (2020–24) and subsequent exhibitions and public programs at MUMA.

Kindred People is an Indigenous‑led gathering held on Boonwurrung Country, guided by Elders and an Indigenous Steering Committee. Each event sits within a broader program of ceremony, performance and knowledge exchange, grounded in respect for Country and the sharing of living Indigenous knowledges. These works invite audiences to listen deeply, learn together and come to the gathering with care.

Acknowledgements:

Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary

Syncretic Wilds: Phasmahammer and Natasha Tontey is presented by Monash University Museum of Art, in partnership with Monash University Performing Arts Centre (MPAC) for Kindred People.