December 4th, 2014

DATE CHANGE: December 5, 2014
LOCATION:
Dumbo Sky 10 Jay Street, #903
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Some thirty years after her sudden death, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha‘s work remains a force in the fields of visual arts, avant-garde poetry, and feminist theory. From her early scholarship on French deconstruction to her video and performance art to her landmark book Dictee, Cha carved a singular space within the history of art, a one-woman avant-garde. Her work, described, in turns, as illegible, de-colonizing, avant-garde, stuttering, provokes us into new understandings of history, language, and the body. The A/P/A Institute at NYU and Asian American Writers’ Workshop are partnering to present an evening of critical reflection, with writers, scholars, and artists responding to Cha’s diverse body of work. We’ll screen Cha’s experimental short film Permutations with an introduction from Light Industry’s Thomas Beard. Poets Christian Hawkey (Ventrakl) and Myung Mi Kim (Penury, Poetics Program, SUNY Buffalo) talk about Cha’s work as an experimental poet. Harvard Divinity School Professor Amy Hollywood (Sensible Ecstasy, Harvard Divinity School) discusses Cha’s mysticism. Crystal Parikh (Department of English and Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, NYU) talks about Cha’s role prefiguring transnational feminism. Readings by poets Jennifer Firestone (Holiday), Tonya Foster (A Swarm of Bees in High Court), and Alison Roh Park (Asian American Studies Program, Hunter College). This will be one of the most comprehensive programs–and one of the few in the last decade–to examine Cha’s work. Co-presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, Belladonna, and Ugly Duckling Press.

RSVP here by Tuesday, December 2.

Part of The Counterculturalists, a series from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop highlighting radicals within aesthetics and political intellectual life.

Image courtesy of UC Berkeley, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive; gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation.