Festival ECRÃ
of Experimental Art and Cinema
SPECIAL PROGRAM
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
9th Festival ECRÃ
The “forgotten” language and video of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
by Seyeong Yoon
Korean-American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 차학경, born in 1951, who died at the young age of 31, has left us with a remarkable body of work and insights that will make a lasting impact on the world in the short and brilliant time she was given. She was a genius who worked across genres, including performance, writing, photography, film, and video art, using language, literature, linguistics, and film semiotics as sources of inspiration and work.
'The forgotten artist', as she is often called by those who knew her. The second Korean artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum in the United States (1993), after Nam June Paik, Cha is unfortunately not widely known in her native Korea - even in the art world. It is only since the 90s that her artistic soul has been remembered in the United States and France, mainly through her book <DICTEE> (1982), a masterpiece that captures the essence of her art.
Even among those who know her, her pioneering video art (Video Poem) works have been relatively unexposed due to the overemphasis on his book <DICTEE>. As a Korean curator and media artist, this has been a great disappointment to me, but I am honoured and excited to finally present his video works to a Brazilian audience at the MAM Rio (Museum of Modern Arts of Rio de Janeiro) Cinemateca through Festival ECRÃ.
In this 9th edition of Festival ECRÃ, we are presenting three of her video works: <Mouth to Mouth> (1975), <Vidéoème> (1976), and <Re Dis Appearing> (1977). These three works are representative of Cha's video poetry, in which she uses the temporality of the moving image medium to explore her reflections on language. Floating memories, shifting identities, “unspeakable” language, and the context of it all are expressed in the language she deconstructs and reassembles. And we “see” that language without reading it. Also, all three works are full of absences. The absence of speech, the absence of identity, the absence of sentences. But the absence is not a mere void; it is a space to explore and reclaim the memory, the body, the silence of being a woman, the “language before it is born on the tip of the tongue” that has been appropriated by colonial language. Furthermore, the space she creates is open to the audience's active realisation of meaning.
Cha's work asks universal questions that transcend nationality and background, and resonates powerfully in today's world, where the question of boundaries and identity is at the forefront of the debate. At the 9th Festival ECRÃ, I invite you to join us for Cha's story that is “more naked than flesh, stronger than bones, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve”.