Moe Satt | Hunting & Dancing: 15 years

Date: Friday, October 20th, at 5:00 pm

Address: 11 Quai de Conti, 75006 Paris,Monnaie de Paris

Moe Satt

Born 1983, Yangon, Myanmar

Lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands 

Moe Satt is a conceptual and performance artist, and curator. In 2008, he founded and organized Beyond Pressure, an international festival of performance art in Myanmar. In his works, which span various mediums from photography, sculpture, to video and sound installations,  Moe Satt addresses provocative social and politic issues in military-ruled Myanmar, such as the role of religion and that of the individual in society. He has been invited to several artist-in-residence programs, among others, ACC in New York (2017); IASPIS in Umeå, Sweden (2016); and International Residence at Recollets, Paris (2015). His work has been featured in several group exhibitions, including Political Acts: Pioneers of performance art in Southeast Asia in Melbourne (2017); CAFAM Biennale, Beijing (2013); and Busan Biennale (2012). Satt was a finalist for the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award 2015. He lives and works in Yangon, Myanmar.

Celebrated for his provocative performance and video based oeuvre, Moe Satt has long used his body as a linguistic, feeling, and motile medium. In Nothing But Fingers, his hands are transformed into  instruments of vital expression, becoming organs for performance, vessels of intimacy and tools for survival.

Moe Satt draws from the visual signals of tribal hunting and gathering, unfolding a chaîne opératoire of animal symbols. His hands at once embody the nimbleness of the deer, then the flamboyance of the peacock, or the acuity of the hawk, demonstrating a full range of imaginative and communicatory abilities. The video plays on dual screens, showing solo performances by the artist and his collaborator, Liah Frank, and their joint performance in the latter half. In the monochromatic austerity of figure and field, Moe Satt presents a stripped study of corporeal communion, connecting human bodies and bodies of thought. He brings forth the unspoken yet most fundamental binaries of existence, marking relationships between the self and the Other, man and animal, and fight or flight.

Nothing But Fingers also retrieves from the artist’s personal history, drawing from the angular, pose-focused style of traditional Myanmar dance, and revealing the subconscious influence of the artist’s university studies in zoology. Furthermore, the work is derived from Hunting and Dancing (2006), an early photographic work Moe Satt created based on animal gestures he encountered in a book and reproduced digitally. The artist revisited this archival work during the pandemic, coming full circle after a decade and a half of creation. 

These gestures of predator and prey serve as a testament to Moe Satt’s enduring influence and commitment to Myanmar’s art scene, the culmination of a practice that has now experienced a coup, a pandemic, and prison. The work has outlived personal, political, and cultural crises, proving the artist’s survival, again and again.

*The artist is presented by Nova Contemporary.