Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Playful Humanity Revealed in BAMPFA Exhibition

The exhibition 'Multiple Offerings' at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive presents a more humanizing portrait of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, moving beyond her tragic murder and weighty themes of displacement. Curators Victoria Sung and Tausif Noor highlight Cha's playful personality through archival materials and artworks, including the 1970s film 'Untitled (Trip & Theresa)' where she smiles and dances. Her 1976 work 'Permutations' features six one-second shots of her sister Bernadette arranged by chance into a ten-minute video, revealing deadpan humor. Cha's physical practice is evident in performance works like 'A Ble Wail' (1975), which references Korean shamanism, and her recurring use of her own body in pieces such as 'Mouth to Mouth' (1975) and 'Passages Paysages' (1978). She treated language as a material, fragmenting words in works like 'The Word' (1975), which plays on 'Americanism,' and 'Surplus Novel' (1980), a poem coiled in a porcelain bowl. The exhibition includes a restaging of 'Exilée' (1980), reflecting on the 16-time-zone distance between Korea and San Francisco after her 1979 trip. BAMPFA received Cha's complete archives from her family in 1992. The show runs through April 19 at 2155 Center Street in Berkeley, California.