Events in Tokyo and Berlin, and a focus on film for 13th edition

Seoul Museum of Art announces events in Tokyo and Berlin, and a focus on film for the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (SMB13), titled Séance: Technology of the Spirit curated by Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis. 

It is a central premise of Séance: Technology of the Spirit that the alienating effects of modernity only intensify the desire to reconnect—through technologies such as cinema, spiritualism, and psychoanalysis—with that which has been lost or repressed. Each of these forms of mediation with other worlds is effected through séances, meaning “sittings” or “sessions,” and each has effected a significant influence on the practice of art over the past century. 

Séance: Technology of the Spirit will, therefore, include a major film program running for the Biennale’s duration at sites across the city. Through regular screenings of short and feature-length films at Seoul cinemas to be announced soon, complemented by a program of discussions and talks, this key part of the exhibition will explore the means by which cinema has connected its audiences to realms that are otherwise hidden or inaccessible. It will also reflect on film as a “mediating” technology that induces in its viewers states conducive to otherworldly experience.

“YANARI: Rattling A House”
At Tokyo Photographic Art Museum on May 31, 2025

Artistic directors Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis will present their developing thinking towards Séance: Technology of the Spirit on the opening day of “YANARI (Rattling a House)”, a curatorial symposium “exploring the entanglements of media, exhibition-making, and geopolitics through the lens of spectral reverberation” at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum.

Screenings of Jane Jin Kaisen’s Wreckage (2024, 12 min); Anton Vidokle’s Citizens of the Cosmos (2019, 30 min); Maya Deren’s Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946, 15 min); and Shana Moulton’s Whispering Pines 9 (2009, 10 min) and MindPlace ThoughtStream (2014, 12 min) will be followed by talks by the artistic directors, a “local response” to the exhibition’s proposals, and a dialogue between the organizers of the Yebisu International Festival and Seoul Mediacity Biennale will be held.

Hosted by the 0-eA Society for the Curatorial in partnership with Seoul Museum of Art, this all-day event begins at 1pm local time on May 31. For further details on the speakers and screening program, please visit the Biennale’s website.

“Notes for a Séance: Towards a Technology of the Spirit”
At the ICI Berlin on June 16, 2025

At Berlin’s Institute for Cultural Inquiry, the artistic directors will be joined by scholar Elena Vogman and artist Angela Melitopoulos to discuss their ongoing research.

Elena Vogman will introduce the media experiments practiced by the reform and resistance movement of institutional psychotherapy, and Angela Melitopoulos will present a “cine-somatic excursus” related to animism with excerpts from her Cine(so)matrix exhibition.

The event will also include screenings of Jane Jin Kaisen’s Wreckage (2024, 12 min); Yin-Ju Chen’s Somewhere Beyond Right and Wrong, There is a Garden. I Will Meet You There (2023, 16 min); and Shana Moulton’s Whispering Pines 5 (2005, 6 min).

Elena Vogman is a scholar of comparative literature and media. She is principal investigator of the research project Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe at Bauhaus University Weimar and a visiting fellow at ICI Berlin.

Angela Melitopoulos is an artist and researcher in the time-based arts, including experimental single-channel tapes, video installations, video essays, documentaries, and sound pieces. In her practice she explores the production of subjectivity and collective memory in the context of mobility, migration, and geography.

Hosted by Seoul Museum of Art in partnership with ICI Berlin, the event begins at 6pm local time on June 16. To register, and for further details on the speakers and screening program, please visit the ICI Berlin website.

Séance: Technology of the Spirit, the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, will be on view to the public at Seoul Museum of Art from August 26 to November 23, 2025. A press and professional preview day will take place on August 25.

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.