Syncretic Wilds: Phasmahammer and Natasha Tontey at Monash University Museum of Art in Melbourne turns ancestral cosmology into queer creature myth by treating myth as something alive, bodily, ecological, and unfinished. On view from 18 July to 19 September 2026, the exhibition brings together Phasmahammer, the artistic persona of Justin Talplacido Shoulder, and Natasha Tontey, a Minahasan artist based between Jakarta and Yogyakarta. Curated by Amanda Haskard (Gunaikurnai) and Pip Wallis, the show places performance, film, installation, costume, sound, and speculative storytelling inside a charged conversation about Indigenous histories across the Indo-Pacific.
For thesurrealists.org, the exhibition matters because it gives Surrealist visual culture a contemporary, decolonial, and creaturely direction. Syncretic Wilds does not use myth as old decoration. It asks how ancestral stories can become tools for surviving environmental crisis, cultural alienation, colonial memory, and the limits of human-centered thinking. Bodies mutate. Animals become social agents. Plants feel animate. Ritual, science fiction, pop culture, and performance cross into each other.
MUMA’s official exhibition page says the exhibition brings the artists into conversation to rethink history and myth, generate speculative fictions, and centre the storytelling of Southeast Asia. That framing gives the show its strongest argument: creature myth is not escapism. It is a way of imagining how to live when old categories of human, animal, plant, spirit, technology, and ancestor no longer feel separate enough.
Why “Syncretic Wilds” Matters Now
The word “syncretic” signals mixture, but the exhibition does more than mix visual references. It brings together living cultural memory, performance, ecology, speculative fiction, queer embodiment, and posthuman thought. The “wilds” are not simply forests or animal territories. They are unstable zones where dominant histories lose control and other ways of remembering become possible.
This matters in 2026 because contemporary art is increasingly turning toward Indigenous knowledge, ecological crisis, and nonhuman relations without always knowing how to avoid extraction or surface-level mysticism. Syncretic Wilds has a sharper premise. It places two artists with distinct cultural positions and strategies into dialogue rather than folding them into one vague global spirituality.
MUMA describes Phasmahammer and Tontey as artists working in posthuman paradigms through immersive films and installations that offer alternative ways of remembering, relating, and world-building. That language is important because it refuses the old museum habit of treating ancestral knowledge as something static. In this exhibition, ancestry moves. It performs. It mutates. It becomes cinematic, sculptural, sonic, and bodily.
The result feels urgent for a Surrealist audience. Surrealism has always been interested in transformation, myth, dream, ritual, and the nonhuman. Syncretic Wilds shifts those interests away from European avant-garde fantasy and toward Indigenous, diasporic, and Southeast Asian forms of world-making.
How Phasmahammer Builds Queer Filipinx Creature Myth
Phasmahammer is the artistic persona of Justin Talplacido Shoulder, an artist based on Gadigal Country/Sydney whose work spans performance, sculpture, video, costume, prosthetics, and collective events. MUMA describes Phasmahammer as generating queer Filipinx futurisms through alter personas based on ancestral mythologies, realized through hand-crafted costumes, prostheses, and gestural choreography.
That practice matters because the creature is not a simple monster or fantasy figure. In Phasmahammer’s work, the creature becomes a method for imagining bodies beyond fixed identity. A persona can hold ancestry, queerness, migration, ecology, club culture, ritual, and science fiction at once. The costume does not hide the body. It re-teaches the body how to move.
Phasmahammer’s own artist website describes Justin Talplacido Shoulder as a shape-shifting artist and storyteller working across performance, sculpture, video, and collective events. It frames the practice as an eco-cosmology of hybrid bodies that collage human, machine, and more-than-human entities. That vocabulary helps explain why the MUMA exhibition feels so close to contemporary Surrealism: it makes identity a living collage.
The queer creature myth here is not a metaphor pasted onto the body. It is embodied through materials, movement, and encounter. Hand-crafted prosthetics and costumes create beings that feel ancient and futuristic at once. The body becomes an archive of possible forms.
Why Natasha Tontey’s Yaki World Feels Ecological And Strange
Natasha Tontey brings another form of creature myth into the exhibition through Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre, a major multi-part installation commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary. MUMA says the work explores layered relationships between humans and the natural world by interweaving primatology with speculative fiction through film, sculpture, costume, and audio.
The work draws on Tontey’s Minahasan heritage and examines complex relationships between local communities and the endangered black-crested macaque, known as Yaki, in South Minahasa. This is a crucial distinction. The macaque is not treated as a generic animal symbol. It belongs to a specific ecological, cultural, and social context where human and nonhuman relationships are contradictory, intimate, contested, and politically charged.
Museum MACAN’s Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre page describes the work as an immersive installation that reverses power relationships between living creatures, monkeys, and humans from the perspective of Minahasan culture. It notes that Yaki can be viewed both as part of everyday social structure by Indigenous communities and as vermin because of crop-raiding, while also being internationally recognized as endangered.
That tension gives Tontey’s work its force. The creature is not cute, exotic, or purely sacred. It sits inside a real conflict over environment, survival, community, and representation. The Surrealist charge comes from how Tontey transforms that conflict into a speculative world where human authority no longer feels secure.
How The Exhibition Uses World-Building As Resistance
Syncretic Wilds treats world-building as more than aesthetic immersion. It uses world-building as a form of resistance. MUMA says the exhibition reflects on global Indigenous histories and brings together two distinctive strategies of resistance across the Indo-Pacific region through visual art. That means the show is not only about fantasy environments. It is about counter-narratives.
Phasmahammer builds resistance through queer Filipinx futurism, creature performance, and communal ceremony. Tontey builds resistance through Minahasan cosmology, speculative ecology, pop-cultural language, and animal-human reversal. The two practices are different, yet both ask viewers to imagine worlds where dominant systems lose their monopoly on reality.
Australian Arts Review’s Syncretic Wilds feature describes the exhibition as bringing together phantasmagoric performance, speculative storytelling, and ancestral cosmologies. It also quotes MUMA director Dr Rebecca Coates, who says the artists expand what contemporary art can hold by moving between performance, film, and installation to foreground storytelling, cultural memory, and speculative thinking.
That statement clarifies the exhibition’s stakes. The show is not only asking what images can look like. It is asking what art can hold: ceremony, fear, animal knowledge, myth, queer nightlife, plant life, ecological tension, and inherited memory.
Why The Body Becomes A Site Of Cosmology
In Syncretic Wilds, cosmology is not distant. It enters the body. Phasmahammer’s costumes and prostheses turn the performer into a hybrid being. Tontey’s installation imagines human-animal relations through film, costume, sculpture, and audio. Both artists make bodies carry systems of relation larger than the individual self.
That approach matters because many museum audiences are used to thinking of cosmology as belief, diagram, myth, or origin story. This exhibition turns cosmology into embodiment. It asks how the body might remember, transform, and transmit ancestral knowledge through movement, sound, skin, costume, and encounter.
This connects naturally with thesurrealists.org’s earlier writing on Leonora Carrington’s creatures, alchemy, and feminist cosmology. Carrington’s mythic beings often challenged human hierarchy and gendered order. Syncretic Wilds extends that conversation into contemporary Indigenous and diasporic performance, where creature forms become tools for repair, resistance, and future-making.
The body, in this exhibition, is not a stable container. It is a threshold. It can become plant, animal, ancestor, machine, spirit, performer, and witness. That is what makes the creature myth queer: it refuses fixed borders and lets identity become relational.
How Queer Futurism Changes Ancestral Myth
Queer futurism is often misunderstood as a turn away from the past. Phasmahammer’s work shows the opposite. Queer futurism can return to ancestral myth without treating it as fixed tradition. It can activate inherited stories through bodies that move differently, desire differently, gather differently, and perform in spaces shaped by nightlife, community, and ritual.
MUMA notes that Phasmahammer’s early work emerged from underground queer club and community spaces, as well as theatre and festival contexts. That history matters because the museum presentation does not erase those origins. Instead, it brings their energy into a new institutional frame.
A club can function as ritual space. A costume can function as ceremony. A dance can function as transmission. A queer creature can hold histories that official culture excludes or misunderstands. This is why Phasmahammer’s work feels relevant to a Surrealist audience: it understands transformation not as costume spectacle alone, but as an alternative way of being.
Queer creature myth also resists purity. It accepts mixture, mutation, play, drag, futurism, ancestral return, and collective healing. It turns the body into a site where past and future can negotiate.
Why Tontey’s Macaque Myth Is Not Animal Fantasy
Tontey’s Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre should not be reduced to animal fantasy. Its power comes from the specific contradiction around the Yaki macaque. The animal is endangered, culturally significant, socially present, and sometimes treated as a problem by communities navigating agriculture and ecological change. Tontey turns that contradiction into speculative art without flattening it into a simple lesson.
Audemars Piguet Contemporary’s Natasha Tontey project page identifies Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre as a large-scale immersive exhibition presented at Museum MACAN in Jakarta from 16 November 2024 to 6 April 2025. That context matters because MUMA is not presenting a minor side work. It is bringing a major installation into a new Australian context after its Indonesian presentation.
The title itself is important. “Primate Visions” suggests looking from outside the human. “Macaque Macabre” adds a darker tone, one connected to death, fear, taboo, and fascination. This language fits the exhibition’s advisory, which notes references to belief systems, ritual imagery, anthropomorphism, and cannibalism, along with immersive sound, kinetic sculptures, and low light conditions.
The result is creature myth with ethical weight. It asks viewers to face the unstable boundary between human community and nonhuman life without turning either side into a simple symbol.
How Posthuman Thinking Becomes Sensory Rather Than Abstract
“Posthuman” can sound theoretical, but Syncretic Wilds makes it sensory. Visitors encounter film, sound, sculpture, costume, low light, kinetic forms, and immersive installation. The exhibition does not only tell viewers that human-centered thinking is limited. It places them inside environments where human perception has to adjust.
That adjustment is central to the show’s Surrealist relevance. Surrealism often worked by disturbing normal perception. Syncretic Wilds does something similar through contemporary tools: cinematic environments, bodily performance, animal perspective, animate plant life, prosthetic transformation, and sonic immersion.
MUMA says Phasmahammer’s newly commissioned immersive installation draws visitors into an experience of animate plant life and reflects the artist’s rhizomatic ethics of entanglement. That phrase points toward a nonhierarchical model of relation. A rhizome spreads sideways. It connects through roots, shoots, and networks rather than a single trunk.
This makes the exhibition feel ecological in structure, not only subject. The artists do not simply depict nature. They ask visitors to experience relation as a web of bodies, species, stories, and times.
Why “Manufactured Fear” Gives The Show A Political Edge
Australian Arts Review notes that Tontey’s broader practice interrogates what she describes as “manufactured fear,” especially the way narratives of otherness are constructed and sustained. That idea gives Syncretic Wilds a political edge. The creature is often feared because culture decides it should be feared. The animal, outsider, hybrid body, queer persona, Indigenous cosmology, or nonhuman agent can all be made into threats by dominant narratives.
The exhibition responds by reclaiming creaturehood. Hybrid beings do not appear as monsters to be controlled. They become agents of possibility. They open alternative futures shaped by resilience, imagination, and cultural memory. That is why the show’s creature myth feels different from horror or fantasy branding.
This is a key point for responsible writing. Syncretic Wilds includes dark, strange, and intense imagery, but the article should not sensationalize it. The exhibition’s value lies in how it transforms fear into inquiry. What do societies fear when bodies become hybrid? What do institutions fear when myth enters the museum? What do humans fear when animals, plants, and ancestors demand agency?
Those questions make the show more than immersive spectacle. They make it an art exhibition about power.
How The Museum Becomes A Ritual Space
MUMA’s presentation is connected with Kindred People, an Indigenous-led gathering held on Boonwurrung Country and guided by Elders and an Indigenous Steering Committee. MPAC’s Syncretic Wilds event page places the exhibition within a wider program of ceremony, performance, knowledge exchange, and respect for Country.
That context matters because it changes the museum’s role. The gallery is not only a container for artworks. It becomes part of a program that asks audiences to listen, learn, and gather with care. In this setting, performance is not merely entertainment. It becomes a mode of relation.
Phasmahammer’s framing of performance as ceremony and communal healing sits strongly within this context. So does Tontey’s collaborative engagement with Minahasan traditions and ecological knowledge. Together, the practices push the museum toward a more embodied form of learning.
For a Surrealist audience, this is significant. Historical Surrealism often borrowed from ritual and myth without always addressing questions of cultural power. Syncretic Wilds works inside a more accountable contemporary framework, where ceremony, community, Country, and cultural specificity matter.
Why Ancestral Cosmology Becomes Queer Creature Myth
Syncretic Wilds turns ancestral cosmology into queer creature myth because it refuses the old separation between past and future. Ancestry is not behind us. It moves through bodies, animals, plants, stories, costumes, sounds, and speculative worlds. Queerness is not only identity. It becomes a method for transforming inherited forms. Creature myth is not only fantasy. It becomes a way to imagine relations that dominant culture has not learned how to see.
Phasmahammer and Natasha Tontey approach these questions differently, but the exhibition makes their differences productive. Phasmahammer’s queer Filipinx futurisms use alter personas, prosthetics, performance, and ceremony to activate ancestral myth through hybrid bodies. Tontey’s Minahasan speculative ecology uses the Yaki macaque, primatology, pop culture, and immersive installation to rethink human and nonhuman power.
Together, they make the museum feel like a threshold. One enters not simply to look at objects, but to encounter worlds where myth has not ended. It has mutated. It has become cinematic, ritual, animal, plantlike, queer, and alive.
For readers of thesurrealists.org, that is the deeper lesson. The surreal is not only the dream of the individual unconscious. It can also be the collective work of reimagining kinship. Syncretic Wilds shows that creature myth can hold ancestry without freezing it, futurism without erasing memory, and strangeness without losing political force.