Natasha Tontey

Hole of the Simian Crone

Natasha Tontey is a Minahasan artist living between Jakarta and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her work reimagines traditional myths and rituals, foregrounding marginalised perspectives and challenging dominant narratives.

Following her 2024 exhibition Primate Visions at Museum MACAN in Jakarta, Tontey continues her speculative inquiry into primate mythologies, human–animal kinship and feminist futurisms with Hole for the Simian Crone. Primate Visions explored the blurring of evolutionary boundaries through Indigenous cosmologies, centring the Yaki (black-crested macaque) as a figure of both reverence and disruption within Minahasan culture.

In this new work, Tontey draws on the “Simian Crone”—an elder orangutan figure in the Planet of the Apes film series who appears as a spiritual authority in simian society. The Crone embodies a potent axis of ancient wisdom, femininity and otherness. The work also references the “Simian Line,” a distinctive palm crease associated in palmistry with intense purpose, power or destiny.

As players navigate the sculptural terrain of the mini golf hole, they move through a landscape shaped by fate, folly and ritual. Hole for the Simian Crone invites reflection on our entanglement with primates—on sentience, speculative ancestry and the ceremonial nature of gesture.

Installation view of ‘Hole of the Simian Crone‘, Natasha Tontey (2025). Commissioned by RISING Melbourne. PHOTO: Eugene Hyland.