Woodland Pattern Experimental Film/Video series presents… presented by the UWM Department of Film “Begins imperceptibly, near-perceptible. (Just once. Just one time and it will take.) She takes. She takes the pause. Slowly. From the thick. The thickness. From weighted motion upwards. Slowed. To deliber- ation even when it passed upward through her mouth Again. The delivery. She takes it. Slow. The invok- ing. All the time now. All the time there is. Always. And all times. The pause. Uttering, Hers now. Hers Bare. The utter.” -From “Diseuse” in Dictee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA: VIDEO a rare screening of the video work of celebrated conceptual artist The Woodland Pattern Experimental Film/Video series is proud to present the recently once-again available video work of acclaimed conceptual artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. The five videos to be shared echo and explore Cha’s trademark themes of speech and identity, language and silence, displacement and exile. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Video will be presented only once on Thursday, November 20, at 7pm at the Woodland Pattern Book Center, 720 E. Locust. Admisssion is $2. The screening is presented by the UWM Film Department and for more information you can contact Carl Bogner at 414 229 4758 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. Informed by French psychoanalytic film theory, her video works use performance and text to explore interactions of language, meaning and memory. Cha’s posthumously published book Dictee is an influential investigation of identity in the context of history, ethnicity and gender. Cha produced a wide range of work before her tragically untimely death in 1982. Her prodigious body of work included mail art, artists’ books, sound pieces, videos, films, performance, installation, and writing. Her remarkable Dictee, a collage book generating an exploration of identity through a cartography of history, memory, gender, and ethnicity, is available at Woodland Pattern. videos to be presented (video descriptions courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix) Secret Spill (27 min, b&w, 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. Mouth to Mouth ( 8 min, b&w, 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. Permutations (10 min, b&w, silent, 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. Videoeme (3 min, b&w, 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, b&w, 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. THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA: VIDEO Thursday, November 20, 7pm $2. Woodland Pattern Book Center 720 E Locust 414 263-5001 Presented by the UWM Film Department. For more information contact Carl Bogner at 414 229 4758, or crlelbog@uwm.edu Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: biography courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix 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 Dictee, 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, Dictee (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. Her work has been shown at the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Artists Space, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Bronx Museum, New York, among other venues. 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.