For students at UC Berkeley, Thursdays often begin in the classrooms of Wheeler or Dwinelle, and they might end at Caffè Strada, where students sit with a friend and watch the sun set down Bancroft street — their papers unwritten and their problem sets unsolved. The time that was intended for "study" will have been much better spent telling stories about the week and impatiently anticipating the weekend. For most people, Thursday is simply another day of the week.

At the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, however, the first Thursday of the month is one to mark. On that evening, BAMPFA opens its meticulously curated collection of 25,000 artworks and 18,000 films and videos to the general public — free of charge to anyone who can make it to the front doors.

On the first Thursday of April 2026, I waited in the BAMPFA atrium for a guided tour of the installation Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings. Two women arrived first, one with glasses and fair hair, another with black hair in a blowout. Soon after, a young couple joined the group with their two children. Then an older pair arrived, their hair a matching natural gray. Finally a student appeared, a large notebook clutched in her right hand and a fountain pen in her left, after which our guide gathered us together and the tour began.

We followed the guide into the first room, where a film was being projected onto a large canvas hung from the corner of the expansive space. The guide positioned us in front of the screen. At first glance, the video appeared to show only static. Once the group had settled, the guide asked us to close our eyes. I expected the familiar buzz of white noise that accompanies static, but it was absent. In its place was the sound of rushing water. When I opened my eyes and looked again, I began to make out an image within the static: an obscured mouth, its lips moving to articulate something that could be neither clearly seen nor heard. The vowels were swallowed by layers of static, the audio submerged beneath the sound of rushing water. The piece was titled Mouth to Mouth. The guide described it as an 8-minute, single-channel black-&-white video depicting the artist mouthing the eight Korean vowels. After our guide’s description, he then turned to the group and asked how the piece made us feel, a question that was met with silent glances. Finally, the woman with glasses began to speak. She described the dissonance of watching what looked like static while hearing the sound of water — a friction between image and expectation that I had felt as well. Her interpretation opened the room. Others began to follow, drawing attention to the film’s focus on the mouth and what it might suggest about disembodiment. Some began to question whether it was a mouth at all, wondering aloud if the shape could be a cave, or even a football.

After the final comments, the guide affirmed that all of our interpretations had merit, and he encouraged us to carry those thoughts through the rest of the exhibit. He then offered context: Cha had migrated from Korea to the United States at age twelve, and displacement was a central thread throughout her work. Yet, to Cha, the pain of displacement was not a crisis endemic to  any specific identity, but the ache of not having an identity to claim. Seen in this light, Mouth to Mouth takes on new weight. The slow, labored mouthing of each Korean vowel becomes an embodied search for one's mother tongue. The running water and visual static pull against each other, creating a dissonance between what we see and what we expect to hear. This tension represents a fragility of communication that speaks directly to the experience of migration and exile.

As we moved further into the installation, the guide described how Multiple Offerings was the largest retrospective in 25 years dedicated to the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Each section explored a specific period in her life, beginning at UC Berkeley, where she enrolled in 1969 and studied art practice, comparative literature, and film. Turning the corner, we were faced with nine large photographs of Cha dressed in a white shirt and white pants lining the walls, alongside a large white banner hanging from the ceiling. This piece, titled Aveugle Voix (Blind Voice), offered glimpses of a performance by the same name. In the photographs, Cha's eyes and mouth are wrapped in fabric: the band across her mouth is imprinted with the word “blind”, while the band across her eyes reads “voice.” The setting is Berkeley's Greek Theatre. Once again, the guide invited the group to interpret the images; this time, there was no reluctance. One visitor spoke about the poetic paradox of the inverted sensory apparatus and what it might suggest about the inability to express oneself. Others noted the choice of all white, reading it as a symbol of purity. The guide built on this, explaining how the white clothing connected to Cha's interest in Korean shamanism as a means of healing from displacement. For Cha, the piece was also a critique of language as a tool of oppression. Aveugle Voix acted as a reflection of the fractured identity that displacement produces. The deliberate silencing of the body, rendered through ritualistic action, speaks to the violence of suppressing marginalized voices and the particular struggle of immigrants to be heard.

Following the guide, we were led into a theater-like room where the next piece, Exilée, was set. The piece consisted of a film being projected onto the far wall where a small video monitor, showing images entirely separate from the projection, was embedded. The projection consisted of silhouetted figures, shadows, handwritten text, faces, landscapes, and repeated gestures that often appear blurred or partially obscured. Some images lingered slowly while others flashed briefly, creating a fractured and dreamlike rhythm. An audio track of the artist’s voice accompanied both sets of images. After we exited, the guide opened the floor to the group. Responses came more quickly than before and people began building off one another's observations. The student described the piece as extending the exhibition's larger thematic thread of displacement. The dual format, projection and monitor running in parallel, she said, exemplify the internal dissonance of trying to reconcile a divided identity. The guide, visibly energized by the group's engagement, thanked everyone warmly before offering his own reading. He explained how Exilée weaves together Cha's personal experience, Korean history, linguistic play, and poetic structure to evoke the texture of exile. The piece also draws attention to the distinct qualities of its two media, Super 8mm film and video: in the differences between them — in the rhythms of the editing, the scale of the images, the quality and sources of light, and the relationship between image and sound — Cha's recurring concern with displacement emerges. Memory surfaces as well, through repetition, fades, and afterimages, and through references to the Japanese occupation's attempts to suppress Korean language and culture. Even the title participates in this layering, playing on the French to suggest both an exiled person and the ongoing condition of living in exile.

The installation concluded with a section dedicated to Cha's most iconic work, the book entitled Dictee. The book represents the culmination of Cha's earlier artistic and intellectual explorations. In it, language, film, performance, semiotics, memory, migration, and spirituality are gathered into a single fragmented text. More capacious than a conventional memoir or novel, Dictee becomes a final convergence of Cha's vision, a hybrid work merging autobiography, political history, theology, cinema, and experimental form in an attempt to reclaim memory and heal the fractures left by migration and colonialism. This section of the installation displayed the original images Cha used in the book alongside the original manuscript that would become the book we know today. The guide gave us time to move through the room and take it all in. It was here that one of the group members asked about Cha's death. The guide paused, visibly reluctant. He chose not to answer directly, explaining that reading her death back into Dictee and treating it as a fatal prophecy fixes the work around something she had not yet experienced, and in doing so undermines the glorious, fractured, transcendent theology she built upon her vanished kingdom. To be seduced by the circumstances of her death, he said, also risks misreading what death actually means in her work: it is not a premonition, but an expression of grief for her homelessness, one she imagined could only be resolved by the extinction of the self.

Cha was keenly attuned to the active role that audiences play in the creation of meaning, and she prioritized nonlinear narratives to allow for more open-ended forms of interpretation. She called this narrative technique “multiple telling with multiple offering,” a phrase from which the BAMPFA exhibition took its title. As I exited BAMPFA, I was struck by an overwhelming sense of connection. Her work, I began to understand, was so influential precisely because of its ability to meet each viewer inside their own experience. Walking back to campus, I realized that the depth of that afternoon had only been possible because of the people who shared it with me. The two women, the young family, the older couple, the student with her fountain pen: each brought something the others could not, and together their perspectives made the work fuller than any single reading could. There is something quietly radical about that. Art has a way of gathering the most unlikely people into the same room and revealing how much they have in common. Even on a Thursday, an ordinary day, people of different ages and different lives find themselves standing together in front of the same image, feeling something. That shared capacity to feel, to reach toward expression, may be the most human thing there is. Artists like Cha remind us of that. Their work is not always easy, and it does not speak to everyone in the same way, but at its best it draws out something that was already there: the quiet fact of our connection to one another.