Natasha Tontey's 'Primate Visions' Blurs Human-Animal Boundaries at MACAN

Natasha Tontey's exhibition 'Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre' at Museum MACAN in Jakarta explores the fraught relationship between the critically endangered crested black macaque and the Indigenous Minahasan people of Sulawesi. The show, running through April 6, 2025, features two videoworks and sculptural installations that blend pop culture aesthetics with posthumanist themes. The centerpiece film follows two primatologists liberating macaques, while the second video presents a talkshow-style interview with a Minahasan war veteran recounting his involvement in the Permesta rebellion of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Tontey's work draws on Donna Haraway's 'Primate Visions' (1989) to challenge dualistic thinking and question naturalized categories. The exhibition includes a giant furry gate modeled after a macaque's backside, a flesh-like rubber sheet, and hybrid objects like a macaque-sofa. While the first video delivers clichéd monologues on nonhuman agency, the second video offers a darker, more complex perspective on primate-human kinship through the lens of warfare and cannibalism. Tontey's practice has gained attention for its madcap explorations of Indigeneity, ecofeminism, and posthumanism, using B-movies, TV melodramas, and videogames as reference points.