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

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was a pioneering conceptual artist and writer born in South Korea, who became well-known in the avant-garde circles of 1970s-’80s San Francisco and New York.

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 ‘Dictée,’ 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 “Dictée.” There will also be a film series from April 2-19 of Cha’s work as it appeared in the original format.

Details: Museum open 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday at 2155 Center St., Berkeley; $18 general admission, bampfa.org