June 8th, 2015
8:30pm
@ grayDUCK Gallery
2213 East Cesar Chavez Street, Austin, TX 78702 (map)
Free ($5-$10 Suggested Donation)
“Theresa Cha’s art stands out, even among the work of the most accomplished and celebrated of her contemporaries, for its formal and material inventiveness, theoretical rigor, and poetic depth. She created a profoundly interrelated body of work in which seemingly simple, sometimes even offhand, artworks drew upon the artist’s remarkably broad understanding of world religions, history, political science, film and film theory, linguistics, psychoanalysis, communications theory, cognitive psychology, and feminism. While it is not necessary to be aware of every point of reference in her work in order to appreciate its aesthetic power and rich poetry, it is enlightening to explore – through a close reading of a number of her works and sources – the ways she balanced aesthetic-poetic expression with a rigorous engagement with some of the most compelling theoretical concerns of her day.” – Lawrence Rinder, The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982)
Mostly known for her posthumously published book Dictée, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha has made a significant contribution to a variety of disciplines (film/video, performance, installation art) within a short but highly influential career. A conceptual artist described as a “one-woman avant-garde” (Asian American Writers Workshop), Experimental Response Cinema is excited to present an evening of her video and film work by the artist. Featuring Charles Alexander, Kimberly Alidio, Nayantara Bhattacharya, and Kyle Schlesinger who will be with us to read segments from Dictée. Programmed by Nayantara Bhattacharya and Ekrem Serdar. Special thanks to Rebecca Cleman, Abby Oberlink, and everyone at Electronic Arts Intermix for their assistance and advice. Limited seating as we will screen a majority of the work on CRT monitors spread across the gallery. First-come, first-serve.
Also see: Communicating the Intermedia Archive: The Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Collection by Monika Kin Gagnon.
grayDUCK was founded in 2010 in South Austin, and relocated to East Austin in 2014. In our art-energized neighborhood, we strive to exhibit the work of exceptional artists while creating a welcoming place for everyone: viewers, artists and neighbors. Monthly shows highlight artist’s work from a broad range of experience, both locally and nationally. Our refurbished 100-year old house is a hybrid of new and old, clean lines and comfortable wood. The inviting space with a modern sensibility is a beautiful place for artwork, poetry readings, film, music and performance, a place where art is integral to everyday life.
Program
Permutations
10 min / DVD on Digital Projector / sound / 1976
The artist’s sister is the subject of this structuralist work, which was originally created as a film. Cha herself appears in a single frame.
Note: This work was originally made on and made to be screened on 16mm film. Special thanks to the estate of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, PFA/BAM, and EAI for allowing us to screen this digital transfer during the PFA/BAM’s loan moratorium as they move into their new space.
Mouth to Mouth
8 min / DVD on CRT Monitor / sound / 1975
English and Korean words appear on the screen, a mouth forms the shape of an “O,” then opens and closes. Is this the beginning of language? In this early videotape, Cha isolates and repeats a simple, physical act – a mouth forming the eight Korean vowel graphemes – so that this ordinary action becomes something primal and riveting.
Vidéoème
3 min / DVD on CRT Monitor / sound / 1976
In this meditation on speech and language, Cha juxtaposes English and French words to form new relationships and meanings.
Re Dis Appearing
3 min / DVD on CRT Monitor / sound / 1977
The artist speaks a word, which is quickly echoed in French, so that the words are only barely comprehended. Simple images – a bowl, a photograph of the ocean – appear and disappear.
Secret Spill
27 min / DVD on CRT Monitor / sound / 1974
In this work, which documents a performance/installation, the tension derives from the ruptures between what is heard, what is seen, and what is ultimately not seen.
Bio
“From the mid-1970s until her death at age 31 in 1982, Korean-born artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha created a rich body of conceptual art that explored displacement and loss. Her works included artists’ books, mail art, performance, audio, video, film, and installation. Although grounded in French psychoanalytic film theory, her art is also informed by far-ranging cultural and symbolic references, from shamanism to Confucianism and Catholicism. Her collage-like book Dictée, which was published posthumously in 1982, is recognized as an influential investigation of identity in the context of history, ethnicity and gender.
In her highly theoretical yet poetic video works, Cha uses performance, speech and text to explore interactions of language, meaning and memory. Much of Cha’s work balances a rigorous analytical approach with an almost spiritual evocation of transformation and suffering. Themes of displacement and rupture are articulated in forms derived from French psychoanalytic cinema and linguistic theory of the 1970s; Cha studied in France with Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour and Thierry Kuntzel, among others. Drawing on sources and strategies as diverse as concrete poetry, Korean cultural traditions and conceptual art, Cha speaks with a distinctive voice.
Cha’s exploration of exile and dislocation in her art is informed by her own history. Uprooted during the Korean War, her family immigrated to America in 1962, moving first to Hawaii and then to San Francisco. After years in the Bay Area and time in Europe, Cha moved to New York City in 1980. As an editor and writer at Tanam Press, she produced two well-known works, Dictée (1982) and Apparatus, an important anthology of essays on the cinematic apparatus.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was born in 1951 in Pusan, South Korea and died in New York City in 1982. Over a ten-year period in the 1970s, she received four degrees from the University of California at Berkeley: a B.A. in Comparative Literature, a B.A. in Art, an M.A. in Art, and an M.F.A. in Art. In 1976 she studied at the Centre d’Etudes Americaine du Cinema in Paris. Cha was awarded an artist’s residence at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, taught video art at Elizabeth Seton College and worked in the design department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From 1980 until her death in 1982, she was an editor and writer at Tanam Press in New York. Her work has been shown at the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Artists Space, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Bronx Museum of Art, New York, among other venues. A major retrospective exhibition of her work, entitled The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982) was organized by University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2001, and traveled to five cities, including Seoul, Korea.” (via EAI)
Charles Alexander is an artist, poet, bookmaker, and the founder/director of Chax Press. He is the author of five full-length books of poetry and nine chapbooks of poetry, editor of one critical work on the state of the book arts in America, and author of multiple essays, articles, and reviews. Alexander’s most recent book of poetry is Pushing Water (Cuneiform Press, 2011). 3 Sentences, a chapbook, is forthcoming from Little Red Leaves. He has taught literature and writing at Naropa University, the University of Arizona, and elsewhere. Currently at work on Collected Essays and a new book of poetry, he lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his partner, painter Cynthia Miller.
Kimberly Alidio is a teacher, tenure-track drop-out, and author of Solitude Being Alien (dancing girl press). She is a Kundiman fellow, alumna of VONA/Voice of Our Nation, a Center for Art and Thought Artist-in-Residence, and a recipient of Naropa’s Zora Neale Hurston Scholarship. Forthcoming and recent work has or will appear in Philippine Palimpsests (New York University Press) and La Vague Journal. She collaborates with the Generic Ensemble Company and dancer-choreographer, Andee Scott. Born and raised in Baltimore, she lives in Austin and on kimberlyalidio.tumblr.com.
Tara Bhattacharya (b.1979) is a multi instrumentalist musician, singer, performance artist and filmmaker. She first came across Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée in the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College, City University of New York.
Her musical oeuvre encompasses a wide variety of different genres including improvisation, electronic composition, chamber music, indian classical music and bengali folk songs. Performance art idols include such luminaries as Leif Elggren, Lynda Bengalis, Martha Rosler and Alison Knowles. Her audiovisual performances often reflect upon the ideas, politics, images and soundtracks of esteemed Bengali filmmaker, Satyjit Ray.
She currently runs Antumbrae Intermedia Events, regularly curating experimental music events and film screenings in Austin, TX.
Forthcoming performances include a live sound composition/ art performance piece at The Blanton Museum as part of Wildly Strange: The Photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, an experimental music concert at New York’s Secret Project Robot with venerable 60’s filmmaker Ken Jacobs, psychedelic pop group diNMachine, Foetus’ JG Thirlwell and Rick Reed, plus, participating in 844 Souls Under The Seas: The Eastland Disaster Centennial Memorial, a multimedia art performance at Chicago’s National Bohemian Cemetery, She will be co-presenting an upcoming screening of Hito Steyerl’s work in the fall with Experimental Response Cinema, Austin, TX.
Kyle Schlesinger is a poet who writes and lectures on typography and artists’ books. His books of poems include: Commonplace (Cuneiform, 2011); Bad Words to the Radio and Other Poems (Least Weasel, 2011); Picture Day (Electio Editions, 2011); What You Will (NewLightsPress, 2012) and Seeing Things (Chax Press, 2012). Poems & Pictures: A Renaissance in the Art of the Book, was published in 2010 by the Center for Book Arts in conjunction with an exhibition that traveled from New York City to Houston, to Buffalo, to Chicago. He is proprietor of Cuneiform Press and Assistant Professor of Communication Design at UHV, where he co-directs the Graduate Program in Publishing.