In Berkeley, a major new exhibit for conceptual and performance art

"For the first time in 25 years Cha's work is getting a major retrospective, opening Jan. 24 and running until April 19 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where she once worked (back when it was the University Art Museum) as an art handler and film usher. Titled Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings, the exhibit presents more than a hundred pieces of ephemera from her life and work much of it never shown in a museum until now."

"Best known for her groundbreaking 1982 publication Dictee,' a hybrid novel-poem that collages image and text, Cha worked across different mediums to explore physical, cultural and linguistic displacement and their attendant effects, the museum writes. This exhibit presents a range of entry points into Cha's work, guiding visitors through the themes memory, displacement and the mutability of language, among others that recur throughout her oeuvre. The show's run will feature a public, day-long academic symposium of so-called Chascholars and a three-hour reading of Dictee."

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was a pioneering conceptual artist and writer born in South Korea who became prominent in San Francisco and New York avant-garde circles in the 1970s–80s. A major retrospective, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings, runs Jan. 24–Apr. 19, 2026, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and presents over a hundred pieces of ephemera, many never before shown in a museum. The exhibition traces themes of memory, displacement, and the mutability of language across Cha’s multidisciplinary practice, highlighting Dictee (1982), performance documentation, and film work. Programming includes a daylong academic symposium, a three-hour reading of Dictee, and a film series of original-format works; museum hours and admission apply.

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