Myanmar’s Moe Satt to Perform at Delfina Foundation, London

Conversation Moe Satt Sam Gaskin

Moe Satt‘s first solo exhibition in Europe, Moe Satt: Rest the Thumbs on the Cheekbones, will take place at the Delfina Foundation in London from 1 October to 17 November.

At the exhibition’s opening on 30 September, Satt will perform the work Pinky Say Something (2024), in which he burns wax casts of pinky fingers jammed onto bullet casings.

Indelible ink has been used in Myanmar to stain voters’ fingers, preventing them from casting multiple votes. Ethnic minorities in Myanmar have cut their little fingers to protest not being able to vote, while the LGBTQ+ community painted their little fingers pink in a campaign seeking decriminalisation of same-sex relationships.

The exhibition will also include a new iteration of Moe Satt’s performance f n’ f (face and fingers) (2008) in The Tanks at Tate Modern.

Born in Yangon in 1983, Satt is part of a pioneering generation of audience who used performance to circumvent censorship. He often uses hands in his own gestural language, which recalls Buddhist mudras. Satt says he doesn’t think of his work as religious, but social and political.

‘When people are born, you take the baby with your hands. When they die, you close their eyes with the hands,’ he told me in 2015.

Satt’s work often alludes to the violence and repression of Myanmar’s military leadership, which returned to power after ousting Aung San Suu Kyi’s party in February 2021.

In a statement, he said, ‘My country has gone back and forth with military rule since 1962, which is why we cannot avoid political issues in our work.’ —[O]

Main image: Moe Satt, from the series 'Pinky Say Something' (2024). Performance at Rijksakademie Open Studio. Photo: Özgür Atlagan.