The first Dutch solo exhibition of Minahasan artist Natasha Tontey (1989) invites you to think of a more inclusive world through speculative fiction. Her fascination finds expression in experimental video works and performances.
For Tontey, the past is not set in stone; it is something that can be revisited, reshaped, and reimagined – especially where histories hold discomfort, silenced knowledge, and unresolved failures. By engaging with these hidden layers, she opens up the possibility of imagining alternative ways of being in the world.
In Macho Mystic Meltdown: Subtracted Anthology, Tontey weaves together personal, colonial, and ancestral histories to create three parallel worlds. Through fictionalised truths and speculative narratives, each video installation in the exhibition unfolds as three chapters of the series Macho Mystic Meltdown. As a visitor you are invited into psychedelic, witty universes where identity becomes fluid, open to transformation, and resistant to fixed categories.
Chapter 1 – Oikouménē (2025) is a psychedelic narrative based on the time Tontey’s father was lost at sea. Through the figures of The Hoarder, The Conspiracy Theorist, The Religious Believer, The Machoist, and The Sceptic of Ancestral Beliefs (Minahasa), the work engages a lifetime’s journey. Themes of memory, loss, and the porous boundaries between lived experience and speculative identity are explored.
Chapter 2 – Monster; She Wrote (2025) is inspired by a notorious Minahasan woman-warrior from the 1950s who gave birth while hiding during the Permesta War in Indonesia. It reimagines her as a site of refusal, rejecting both militarism and biological destiny.
Chapter 4 – In a Muscle Mood (2026), co-commissioned by 1646, Tontey presents the fictional ‘Manguni Body Building Club’, formed by Minahasa Permesta war veterans who migrated to Jakarta in the 1950s. Through their ageing, muscular, and war-worn bodies, the work explores themes of trauma, care, and fragile masculinity within the tense landscape of postcolonial Indonesia. The work draws partial inspiration from the autobiography of Boeng Dotulong (XXXX – 2026), a Permesta veteran who relocated to Jakarta after the war and later migrated to the former colonial metropolis of the Netherlands.
Macho Mystic Meltdown: Subtracted Anthology opens on Friday 11 September 2026, 19:00 at 1646 – Experimental Art Space; Boekhorststraat 125, The Hague.
About Natasha Tontey
Natasha Tontey (1989) is a Minahasan artist based between Yogyakarta and Jakarta. Her artistic practice predominantly explores the fictional accounts of the history and myths surrounding ‘manufactured fear.’ Through her work, she observes the possibilities of other futures that are projected not from the perspective of major and established institutions, but a subtle and personal struggle of the outcast entities and beings. Her fascination with speculative fiction finds expression in experimental video works and performances.
