Natasha Toney brings surveillance, myth, and Indigenous memory to Venice
At the Venice Biennale, Indonesian artist Natasha Toney will unveil an ambitious new installation inside the Ateneo Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, the 16th-century building in San Marco. Opening May 5, the work, titled “The Phantom Combatants and the Metabolism of Disobedient Organs,” is jointly commissioned by Berlin’s LAS Art Foundation and Helsinki’s Amos Rex and will remain on view through October 25 before traveling to Amos Rex in 2027.
The installation combines video, sound, light, and sculptural elements to revisit the story of Len Karamoy, a combatant in Permesta, the CIA-supported political movement that fought the Indonesian government from 1957 to 1961 in North Sulawesi. Toney, who is 37, transforms Karamoy from a single historical figure into a multiplied, mythic presence, surrounded by a chorus of young troops. In the project’s visual language, Karamoy becomes larger than life, with three breasts and exaggerated muscles — a body that reads as both fantastical and self-possessed.
Toney has built a reputation for darkly humorous videos and installations that move between Indigenous identity, ecology, futurism, and the unstable border between history and myth. Her work often draws on the look of B-movies, horror films, and low-budget television, then pushes that imagery through DIY effects and advanced imaging tools. In Venice, that approach extends to LiDAR remote sensing, quantum ghost imaging, 3D modeling photogrammetry, and thermal cameras, technologies she uses to rethink surveillance and control rather than simply reproduce them.
In a statement, Toney said she is trying to listen to “the quieter tones of history” — the fragments of memory, mourning, and ritual that survive beneath louder narratives. LAS Art Foundation CEO Bettina Kames and Amos Rex CEO Kieran Long called the project her most ambitious to date, saying it speaks to a moment marked by uncertainty and shifting political and technological conditions.
The Venice presentation follows Toney’s first major institutional exhibition, “Primate Visions Macaque Macabre,” which ran at Jakarta’s Museum MACAN from 2024 to 2025. That show helped propel her onto the international biennial circuit, with upcoming appearances at the 59th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh and the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement in Tunis, as well as recent participation in the 2025 Istanbul Biennial, the 2025 Mercosul Biennial in Brazil, and the 2022 Singapore Biennale. Venice now gives her work a larger stage — and a sharper historical charge.
