Political Burma and Art as Obligation

Spring 2018

Abstract:

"'I don’t think I can work on more contemporary happenings without finishing the story of the past. I am not done yet. There is still so much more to say.'

                                                        –Moe Satt to author,February 18, 2018.

Since the emergence of the performance art canon in Burma in the late 1990s politics has been the fuel, the content and context behind contemporary Burmese performance art. 

There was a responsibility placed upon Moe Satt’s shoulders: twenty minutes to cover a two-hundred-year worth of history to an audience who mostly has little or no knowledge of the country and circumstances in question; twenty minutes to condense one’s personal history and that of one’s country into a single narrative. Moe Satt’s Memoir Cocktail is the most conspicuous example of a historicization of the Burmese condition through contemporary performance art.'

For full-length dissertation and citations, please contact me through email: thtwe@artic.edu, thet2nh@gmail.com