Nova Contemporary is pleased to present Hunting & Dancing: 15 years, Moe Satt’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition celebrates 15 years of Moe Satt’s artistic career, featuring a new two-channel video work and coinciding with the launch of his artist book, F’n’F (Face and Fingers).
Celebrated for his provocative performance and video-based oeuvre, Moe Satt has long used his own body as a linguistic, feeling, and motile medium. In his new two-channel video, Nothing But Fingers, the hands become an instrument of vital expression, standing in for the body’s whole. Moe Satt delves into the vast possibilities of visual and haptic interaction, constructing a rich symbolic and gestural repertoire of his own. His hands are transformed into thinking and feeling entities, becoming organs for performance, vessels of intimacy and tools for survival.
In Nothing But Fingers, MoeSatt unfolds a chaîne opératoire of animal symbols. He draws from the practices of hunter-gatherer tribes, referencing the visual signals used in collective hunting. Here, the hands demonstrate their full range of imaginative and communicatory abilities, shifting from the nimbleness of the deer to the flamboyance of the peacock, or the acuity of the hawk. The video plays on two life size, back-to-back screens, respectively showing solo performances by Moe Satt and his collaborator, Liah Frank. In these black voids of silence, the two engage in near-identical sequences, consuming yet confining us in their meditative movements.
The paired channels bring the two into a joint performance in the video’s latter half, guided by the artist’s piercing whistle. In the monochromatic austerity of figure and field, Moe Satt presents a stripped study of the body and bodies together. His hands enable corporeal communion, connecting human bodies and bodies of thought. Creating unspoken understanding beyond language, he brings forth the most fundamental binaries of existence, marking relationships between the self and the Other, between man and animal, and between fight or flight.
Nothing But Fingers also forms a layered retrieval from the artist’s personal history. As if pieced together through stop motion, the chosen gestures are derived from the angular and pose-focused style of traditional dance in Myanmar, the artist’s home country. Furthermore, this new work, as well as the show’s title, takes inspiration from the early stages of the artist’s practice.
Moe Satt first took interest in these animal forms fifteen years ago, after coming across a book on tribal hunting. Subconsciously influenced by his university studies in zoology, Moe Satt recreated the gestures he encountered and recorded them with his first digital camera, creating a simple index of images in Hunting and Dancing (2006). Combing through his own archives for new inspiration during the pandemic, Moe Satt decided to revisit and recreate this early work, coming full circle after a decade and a half of creation. In the main gallery’s adjoining reading room, the original Hunting and Dancing hangs above the artist’s new book, as if presenting a miniature retrospective of the artist’s evolution.
Establishing a departure from his past bodies of work, Nothing But Fingers eschews overt political baggage. Yet, it still stands as undeniable evidence of survival. In subject matter, the portrayed gestures were literally used by prehistoric humans to slaughter and scavenge, acting as symbols of predator and prey. For the artist, Hunting & Dancing: 15 years further serves as a testament to his enduring influence and commitment to Myanmar’s art scene. Unveiled as part 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.
Text by Colette Auyang
