Moe Satt is included at the Asia Art Archive's exhibition at documenta fifteen, initiated by Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa. The exhibition, Translations, Expansions, is organised around the concept of lumbung (“rice barn”), which refers to communal buildings in rural Indonesia where the harvest is stored and distributed to the community. Collectivity and resource distribution constitute the main values and principles for the structure and working methods.
As part of a group of collectives and organisations working on education and archiving in an expanded sense, AAA’s contribution to documenta fifteen is a display that foregrounds the active role artists themselves have played in preserving and mediating cultural knowledge. Located in the Fridericianum—one of the first public museums in the world and one of the main venues of documenta fifteen—Translations, Expansions presents artworks and archival materials about collective undertakings by artists who learn from vernacular cultural practices across Asia.
These collective undertakings include the artists connected to the Baroda Faculty of Fine Arts, who participated in the Living Traditions movement in post-independent India; Womanifesto, a feminist art collective and a biennial programme in Thailand most active from 1997 to 2005; and the network of performance art festivals that blossomed across East and Southeast Asia starting in the 1990s, as documented by Ray Langenbach, Lee Wen, and others. These instances have inspired and informed AAA’s own understanding of archives as sites for knowledge-sharing and artistic production.
