In collaboration with BAMPFA, Small Press Traffic presents a collective marathon reading of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s genre-defying work Dictee (1982) by members of the Bay Area arts community. Audience members are encouraged to participate in this collective and open-ended reading.

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Please indicate if you would like to read in the marathon.

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Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings

January 24–April 19, 2026

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings is the first retrospective in twenty-five years dedicated to the groundbreaking work of the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (b. 1951, Busan, South Korea; d. 1982, New York City). Cha produced an expansive range of works across text-based media, video, and performance, including her posthumously published book, Dictée (1982). The artist’s interdisciplinary practice gave shape to the experimental art scenes in San Francisco, New York City, and beyond.

After emigrating from South Korea to the United States, Cha enrolled in 1969 at UC Berkeley, where she studied art practice, comparative literature, and film. Keenly attuned to the active role that audiences play in the creation of meaning, she prioritized nonlinear narratives to allow for more open-ended forms of interpretation—what she termed a method of “Multiple Telling with Multiple Offering.” The retrospective adopts this framework to allow for 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 in her oeuvre.

Image credit: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Other Things Seen, Other Things Heard (Ailleurs), 1978. Documentation of performance at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Photograph by James H. Cha. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation.

BAMPFA

2155 Center Street

Berkeley, CA