LAS Art Foundation (Berlin) and Amos Rex (Helsinki) present a new commission by Natasha Tontey at Ateneo Veneto on the occasion of the Biennale di Venezia – 61st International Art Exhibition. Tontey’s multi-media installation relays the story of a 1950s female resistance fighter in Indonesia. Exploring bodily transformation, Minahasan symbolism and contemporary military imaging, the work addresses agency and subversion in times of surveillance.

The Phantom Combatants and the Metabolism of Disobedient Organs, is Natasha Tontey’s largest and most ambitious work to date. It is commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and Amos Rex, two future-oriented art institutions founded within the last 10 years to support new artistic practices in a technological age. The Phantom Combatants is on view at Ateneo Veneto, Venice’s academy of science, literature and the arts, located in San Marco in a 16th-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 uses the playful aesthetics of campy B-Movies and military imaging—including the latest quantum ghost imaging, LiDAR and thermal cameras—to reimagine the story of Len Karamoy. Karamoy was part of Permesta, a political movement in North Sulawesi fighting the centralised rule of the Indonesian government with support from the CIA—who attempted a coup in 1958.

In Tontey’s retelling Karamoy moves through time. She is the Phantom Combatant and her Disobedient Organs are her biologically altered body parts. A powerful “shapeshifter and trickster”, Karamoy invokes a Minahasan ritual of war to make herself invisible and invincible and eludes domination with help from hormones and hallucinogens. Like spores of the forest’s mycelian network, her character reappears in a series of avatars.

Karamoy, like Tontey, is Minahasan, an ethnic group based in North Sulawesi whose layered identity includes both Christian and animist beliefs. Ateneo Veneto’s coffered ceiling, visible above Tontey’s installation, depicts the Cycle of Purgatory, painted by Jacopo Palma il Giovane in 1600. An incorporated part of the Minahasan belief system, Purgatory also reflects the liminal state of conflict explored by Tontey in The Phantom Combatants.

By rethinking war resistance through biological enhancement, ancestral ritual and the subversion of surveillance, The Phantom Combatants speaks to today’s technological landscape of military conflict, digital control and the struggle for bodily agency and self-determination.