Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Aveugle Voix, 1975 (performance view). Collection Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Collection and Archive, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Courtesy BAMPFA. Photo: Trip Callaghan

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings is the first US retrospective of the artist in more than twenty years and highlights her critical investigations into language, memory, and diasporic identity. Cha (b.1951, Busan, South Korea; d.1982, New York) was a visual artist and writer who studied and practiced in the Bay Area, Paris, and New York. Featuring over 100 objects and ephemera drawn primarily from the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Collection and Archives, donated to Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in 1992, the exhibition will provide the most comprehensive presentation of Cha’s artwork to date, and include works never before on view. 

With this exhibition, Victoria Sung aims to respond to a desire for greater public access to Cha’s work. In the spirit of the artist’s multivalent approach, the exhibition will allow for what Cha called “Multiple Telling with Multiple Offering,” and will include Mouth to Mouth and Aveugle Voix (both 1975), in which Cha used fractured sound and stenciled text to stage the failures and violence embedded in translation; Audience Distant Relative (1977), in which the viewer becomes an “activator central to an exchange”; and The Word (1975), a stamped T-shirt critical of nationalisms, among many other works and archival materials. Peer voices (such as Yong Soon Min, Yvonne Rainer, and Terry Fox) as well as those of contemporary artists (including Na Mira and Cici Wu) will help place Cha within a constellation of artistic practices. 

Na Mira, Marquee, 2023. 16 mm film transfer to HD, transmitter, radio, mirrors, wood, and paint. Installation view in Perpetual Language at Croy Nielsen, Vienna, September 9–October 14, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Paul Soto, New York. Photo: Kunstdokumentation.com

The accompanying catalogue will include commissioned texts by curators and scholars who have not previously published on Cha, including Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jordan Carter, Danielle A. Jackson, Min Sun Jeon, Mason Leaver-Yap, Na Mira, Tausif Noor, Cici Wu, and Sung herself, alongside archival materials published for the first time.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Mouth to Mouth, 1975 (still). Video, color, and sound. Collection Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Collection and Archive, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Courtesy BAMPFA

Victoria Sung is the Phyllis C. Wattis Senior Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), where she oversees the museum’s long-standing MATRIX series of contemporary art and works with artists to produce exhibitions, publications, and public programs. Recent projects include solo presentations by Amol K Patil, Duane Linklater, Sin Wai Kin, Kenneth Tam, and Yee I-Lann. Previously, Sung was a curator for eight years at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), where she organized retrospective and survey exhibitions on Pacita Abad (2023; traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [SFMOMA], MoMA PS1 [New York], and the Art Gallery of Ontario), Theaster Gates (2019), and Siah Armajani (2018; co-organized with the Metropolitan Museum of Art [New York]). She also commissioned and exhibited new work by Candice Lin, Rayyane Tabet, Pao Houa Her, Shen Xin, and Laure Prouvost. Sung has held curatorial positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. 

Tausif Noor is Curatorial Associate at BAMPFA, where he helped organize the exhibitions To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)Permanent Collection (2024–25) and Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection (2024–25). From 2017 to 2020, he was the Spiegel-Wilks Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (ICA Philadelphia), and previously held positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Imperial War Museum (London), and the 2014 Kochi-Muziris Biennale. His art criticism—which has been supported by a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and the Grace Dudley Award from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation—appears in Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books, among other publications, as well as in various exhibition catalogues and edited volumes. He has served as a visiting critic in the MFA programs at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), the University of Michigan, and Carnegie Mellon University, and is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley.

Aaron Gomez, David Evans Frantz, Amy L. Powell, Luckman Fine Arts Complex at California State University, Los Angeles