Phantasmagoric performance, speculative storytelling and ancestral cosmologies converge this winter at Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA in Syncretic Wilds – a major exhibition bringing together Gadigal/Sydney-based artist Phasmahammer and Minahasan artist Natasha Tontey.
Immersive, cinematic and unapologetically bold, the exhibition stages a charged dialogue between two artists reshaping how history, myth and identity can be imagined from Southeast Asian and Indigenous perspectives.
Across performance, film and installation, Phasmahammer (the artist name of Justin Talplacido Shoulder) and Tontey construct vivid and immersive speculative worlds which are part ritual, part science fiction, challenging dominant narratives and proposing new ways of remembering, sensing and relating.
At once visually striking and conceptually urgent, the exhibition unfolds as a process of world-building. Entering through the anus of a monkey, the exhibition creates an environment where ancestral knowledge, queer futurism and post-human thinking collide. Bodies transform, timelines blur and mythologies are reactivated as tools for navigating the present.
“Phasmahammer and Natasha Tontey are artists who fundamentally expand what contemporary art can hold. Their work moves fluidly between performance, film and installation to create immersive experiences that foreground storytelling, cultural memory and speculative thinking. This exhibition reflects MUMA’s commitment to presenting ambitious, internationally engaged practices that resonate deeply with our region,” said Dr Rebecca Coates, Director, MUMA.
Having recently presented solo exhibitions at Museum MACAN in Jakarta and Auto Italia in London, this exhibition marks Tontey’s first major presentation in Australia. A Minahasan artist based between Jakarta and Yogyakarta, she fuses ancestral cosmologies with pop-cultural languages of gaming, fantasy and internet folklore to create richly layered video installations and immersive environments.
Building on her major 2025 work Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre, commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary, the exhibition explores the multi-layered relationships between humans and the natural world, interweaving primatology with speculative fiction.
Drawing on her Minahasan heritage, she examines the complex and often contradictory interactions between local communities and the endangered black-crested macaque, known as Yaki, in South Minahasa.
Her broader practice interrogates what she describes as “manufactured fear”; how narratives of otherness are constructed and sustained. Across her work, outcast figures and hybrid beings become agents of possibility, opening pathways to alternative futures shaped by resilience, imagination and cultural memory.
Gadigal/Sydney-based Phasmahammer, the artist name of Justin Talplacido Shoulder, creates queer Filipinx futurisms through transformative alter personas drawn from ancestral myth. Through elaborate handcrafted costumes, prosthetics and choreographed gestures, Shoulder conjures otherworldly beings that move between ritual, performance and embodiment, offering encounters with deep time and non-human presence.
“This exhibition brings together two powerful practices that centre storytelling as a living, evolving force. Through speculative and embodied approaches, Phasmahammer and Tontey activate ancestral knowledge while imagining new futures, offering audiences a space to reflect on connection, resistance and the enduring presence of Indigenous and diasporic cultures across the Asia Pacific,” said Amanda Haskard, Indigenous Curator, MUMA.
Emerging from underground club and community contexts, Phasmahammer’s work enters the museum here as a form of ceremony and collective experience. Tontey’s collaborative, research-led approach similarly foregrounds shared knowledge-making, drawing on Minahasan traditions to reconnect with ecological and cultural systems. Together, their practices propose storytelling as both resistance and repair; as a means of reimagining how we live through complexity, crisis and change.
Syncretic Wilds: Phasmahammer and Natasha Tontey
Monash University Museum of Art, 900 Dandenong Road, Caulfield East
Exhibition continues to 19 September 2026
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.monash.edu for details.
Images: Natasha Tontey, Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre, 2024 (video still) | Phasmahammer, Anitismo, 2026. Performance view, Auckland Pride, 2026 – photo by Bunty Bou