In Garden Amidst the Flame (2022), ancestral rituals and Indigenous knowledge forms are mobilised as sites of resistance, imagination and care. Natasha Tontey’s work draws on the cosmology of the Minahasa, an Indigenous nation in Indonesia, to explore the Minahasan cultural belief in equilibrium between human and more-than-human entities. Garden Amidst the Flame takes the form of a coming-of-age story with magical-realist elements about a group of girls. Throughout the film – produced in collaboration with Wulan Lengkoan, a dance troupe of schoolgirls in Sonder, North Sulawesi, who practice the kabasaran martial arts – Tontey interweaves aspects of her Minahasan culture. Her work critiques masculinity within a rapidly changing cultural framework, while the film’s saturated colour palette and choreographic movements echo the ceremonial traditions from which it draws.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Natasha Tontey (b. 1989, Minahasa) is a Minahasan artist based between Yogyakarta and Jakarta. Her artistic practice predominantly explores the fictional accounts of history and myths surrounding ‘manufactured fear’. In her practice, she observes the possibility of other futures, projected forward not from the perspective of established institutions, but through the subtle personal struggles of societal outcasts and other marginalised beings. Her solo exhibitions include Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre, Museum MACAN, Jakarta (2024) and Garden Amidst the Flame, Auto Italia, London (2022). Group exhibitions and screenings include presentations at 36th FIDMarseille (2025); KANAL-Centre Pompidou, Brussels (2023); Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2021); transmediale, Berlin (2021).
EXHIBITED WORKS
Natasha Tontey (b. 1989)
Garden Amidst the Flame, 2022
Single-channel video, 16:9, colour, 27:48 min, stereo
Variable dimensions
Courtesy of the artist
