Theresa Hak Kyung Cha retrospective ‘Multiple Offerings’ at BAMPFA

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the Korean American artist whose experimental novel Dictee was published days after her 1982 murder, is the subject of “Multiple Offerings,” a retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) running through April 19. The show presents what curators describe as the most complete picture to date of Cha’s interdisciplinary practice from a career of barely a decade, including early student ceramics, moving-image work such as the 16-mm film Permutations (1976), performance ephemera, a reconstruction of her installation Exilée (1980) and a large selection from her archives.

Cha’s Dictee, published just after her death and written in English, French and Korean with family photographs and found images, propelled her to a cult status among artists and scholars. Over the decades her work has been revisited in exhibitions at the Whitney and Bard’s Hessel Museum, in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and, more recently, at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; her archives have been housed at U.C.

Berkeley since 1992, where she studied and worked. The exhibition also includes works by artists who have engaged with Cha’s work, a curatorial choice driven by contemporary conversations, Margot Norton said. Artists in the show include Cecilia Vicuña, Renée Green, L. Franklin Gilliam, Cici Wu and Jessie Chun, whose pieces reference Cha’s concerns with language, memory, displacement and the materialization of words in performance.

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