FRIDAY-SUNDAY, DECEMBER 3 – 5 | 12PM – 8PM

Second Shift Studio Space welcomes you to the exhibition Body Sequencing Solidarity by Myanmar artists Chaw Ei Thein and Moe Satt in collaboration with FD13 Residency.

Viewable from the public sidewalk and street in the window vitrines of Second Shift Studio Space, Body Sequencing Solidarity is an exhibition by Myanmar artists Moe Satt and Chaw Ei Thein featuring two performance works documented on video – F ‘n’ F (Face and Fingers) (2009) and Untitled (2010).

Created independently of one another, the performances share in common the centering of the artist’s bodies through sequential choreography as a technology of solidarity in the aftermath of the 2007 Saffron Revolution, an uprising with strong ties to the 1988 and the 2021 calls for democratic reforms specific to Myanmar. While both performances are considered iconic to Myanmar’s art histories, they also alert us to the power of art and artists today during the unprecedented multi-ethnic civil disobedience movement across Myanmar and its diasporas since the military junta took power on February 1, 2021.

In edited excerpts of Untitled (2010 -), Chaw Ei Thein performs a body sequence based on a torture manual used in Myanmar’s prisons. Self-inflicting a choreography intended to violently strain the body, mind, and spirit, she foregrounds strength and perseverance to honor those who remained in prison for years after her detainment. Moe Satt’s F ‘n’ F (Face and Fingers) (2009) documents the artist striking and transitioning between 108 poses that focus on his head and hands. This secularization of mudras, or hand gestures sacred to Dharmic religions’ deities, rebels against coopting practices in militarized Myanmar. F ‘n’ F is equally a document of Moe Satt’s early exploration of conceptual artistic languages’ relation to censorship, inscribing through the body a language of the people – everyday deities striving to commune and communicate free from military rule.  

Body Sequencing Solidarity celebrates differential artistic vocabularies of resistance related to the political rendering of bodies and personhoods – Moe Satt in-country and Chaw Ei Thein in-exile. The site of exhibition in East Side St. Paul thus also becomes poignant as home to the largest Karen community in the United States who, alongside many of Minnesota's Karenni and Mon communities, are active in solidarity and liberation movements across Myanmar.

- Erin Gleeson, FD13 Director