From Perte Loss, 1979. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation.

In 1979, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha submitted a proposal for a two-channel video performance titled Perte Loss to the San Francisco–based collective Video Free America. The performance, she explained, would explore multiple valences of the French word perte: “loss, articulated as memory, time, image, etc within the duration of the piece.” One channel, representing the present, would consist of moving images and words in the present tense. The other would represent the “memory for / of channel #1” and would consist of still images and words in the past tense. The artist herself would mediate between the two channels, appearing behind glass as “a video image” and incorporating performance, still and moving image, and both live and recorded sound to evoke the process of “giv[ing] life to what is fixe, mort, by remembering.”

Two months before she was scheduled to perform the piece at Video Free America as part of a group show of “Video Performance Art,” Cha formally withdrew from the exhibition due to a lack of both financial and philosophical support. “I have no desire or need to make compromises on the conceived project, for it to completely transform itself into no longer the same piece,” she explained. She would not live to realize the piece in its originally intended form.

The brutal fact of Cha’s rape and murder in New York in 1982 is an irreducible part of the encounter with her work, yet it is not the only way Cha’s archive prompts us to reckon with incompletion. Cha experimented with an aesthetics of fragmentation and ellipsis; ideas and forms recur and evolve across projects, inviting us to undo the commonplace divisions between unfinished and finished works and to instead see them as part of one continuous creative practice. Read More

Images courtesy of Hayley O’Malley and reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Kathleen Collins.

It is a stitched composition notebook in a classic style: speckled, with a black-and-white cover. Burnished by time, it’s also patterned by a network of surface fissures, corrugated marks, and mottled shapes yellowing to gold. At some point the notebook appears to have been bent back on itself—crushed, perhaps, in the bottom of a bag or a drawer. I can only make out some of the words written on the front in blue ballpoint: “NOVEL,” confident in capitals, and what I’m pretty sure is the year “1974.”

The notebook belongs to Kathleen Collins, the Black American writer, filmmaker, teacher, and activist whose body of creative work was mostly unpublished and unproduced prior to her death from cancer, at forty-six years of age, in 1988. Beginning with the long-delayed 2015 theatrical release of her feature film, the 1982 independent drama Losing Ground, Collins’s work has found the broad public audience it didn’t during her lifetime. Her posthumous acclaim has been secured largely through the work of her daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, who, as a nineteen-year-old in 1988, gathered her mother’s papers from her house and stashed them in a large trunk. They stayed there for many years until she felt ready to sort through them.

When she did, it was a revelation. Nina discovered a trove of typewritten manuscripts, including dozens of short stories, plays, and screenplays, in which her mother composed sharply observed fictions of Black middle-class life. Those manuscripts now form the spine of Collins’s official archive at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library; they’re also the basis of the two published volumes of Collins’s writing that Nina edited, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? (2016) and Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary (2019).

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