Title, identity, dates, and extended team members of 13th edition

The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (SMB13) announces further details of the exhibition, titled Sèance: Technology of the Spirit.

Curated by Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis, Séance: Technology of the Spirit will be open to the public at Seoul Museum of Art and other venues across the city from August 26 to November 23, 2025. The Biennale will present new and existing work from artists around the world, past and present, who have drawn on occult, mystical, and spiritual traditions. Key to their proposal is that these alternative “technologies” contest the accelerationist and rationalistic logics of capitalist modernity, and might therefore help us to resist—and reconfigure—the political and intellectual structures that shape our experience.

This “exhibition-as-séance” draws on the long history of attempts to contact worlds beyond waking life and seeks to outline how this engagement transformed the languages and methods of artistic production. The title puts forward that the popularity of these alternative “technologies of the spirit” correlates to periods of drastic social and political upheaval, and might be interpreted as a response to their attendant insecurity, anxiety, and disorientation. The list of artists, filmmakers, and authors contributing to the exhibition, public program, and publications will be released in the coming months.

COLLECTIVE is a globally oriented architecture studio—practicing architecture, interiors, and exhibition design—headquartered in Hong Kong with team members in London, Madrid, and Perth. Bringing together different expertise and wide international project experience, the studio challenges the status quo of the “named” architecture office. COLLECTIVE is currently steered by Betty Ng, Chi Yan Chan, and Juan Minguez, working with a diverse team from around the world.

nonplace studio was founded in 2022 by Mengyi Qian, Xi Chen and Churong Mao. Working in fields including (but not limited to) installations, moving images, virtual experiences, and visual design, nonplace promotes interdisciplinary cooperation. It is committed to experimental visuals as a means of creating new experiences among people, mediums, and spaces.

Ben Eastham is a writer and editor. Previously cofounder of The White Review, an editor at ArtReview, and associate editor at Documenta 14, he is the editor of publications on Arshile Gorky, Luis Camnitzer, and Fabio Mauri and author of  books including The Imaginary Museum (TLS Books,  2020) and The Floating World (Fitzcarraldo Editions, forthcoming). He is Editor-in-Chief of e-flux Criticism. 

Sanna Almajedi is a curator and writer currently serving as Performance Curator at e-flux. She co-curated Publishing Against the Grain–which was produced by Independent Curators International and toured institutions including Zeitz MOCAA and CCA, Lagos–and more recently curated Babel at SARA’S/Dunkunsthall and Bricks of Memory, Fragments of Home, an online exhibition for White Columns. 

Working alongside the artistic directors Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis, the SMB13 team at the Seoul Museum of Art includes Biennale Project Director Jin Kwon, Assistant Curators Hanul Cho, Jie-young Song, Jihee Jun, Nahyun Kim, Soim Lee, and Ye-rin Joo, and Coordinators Eunhyun Park and Hyeonju Lee.

The visual identity for SMB13, designed by nonplace studio, is founded on a series of radiant halos symbolizing spiritual energy. Their arrangement into modular structures expresses the organization of immaterial forces into the patterns and forms of art and techne, providing a flexible, transformable, and infinitely extendable visual system.

As an initiative of the Seoul Metropolitan Government since 2000, Seoul Mediacity Biennale has earned international recognition for its experimental engagement with contemporaneous changes within the media landscape of the city, redefining what media is and can be over the course of its previous twelve editions. These conceptual approaches were first explored in the Biennale’s precursor exhibition framework, SEOUL in MEDIA, held three times between 1996 and 1999.

Further details of the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale will be announced in the coming months through the SMB’s website.