Opening statement

Opening on August 26, 2025, the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale Séance: Technology of the Spirit begins with a question: what role has spiritual experience played in the development of modern and contemporary art? 

Over the past decade, it has been impossible to ignore the number of artists turning for inspiration to alternative forms of knowledge. The mystic, visionary, or arcane—often as enshrined in suppressed cultural traditions—has come to occupy a central place in the artistic discourse. This renewed interest in spiritual practice seems to us to respond to a broader crisis in how we make sense of the world. 

Seoul—a city shaped as much by its rich spiritual traditions as modernity—offers the ideal platform for an investigation into the social, political, and historic contexts for this cultural shift. Not only to showcase the relevant works being made today, but to situate them within a tradition dating back to the nineteenth century.   

To that end, we start with the explosion of popular interest in spiritual practice that played a formative role in the birth of modern art, and that links those unsettled times to our own. One expression of that spiritual revolution was the proliferation of séances, literally “sittings” in which mediums connected their audience to the spirit realm. 

In the following decades, rituals as varied as cinema screenings, psychoanalytic sessions, and experimental theatrical performances also came to be referred to by this term. And so we adopted the séance as metaphor and model for the exhibition: a mediated experience by which to access worlds beyond the everyday.

Amidst the disorienting transformations of the present day, artists are rediscovering these buried traditions. Mystics such as Helena Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Georgiana Houghton, and Hilma af Klint emerge as prophetic figures in the secret histories of abstract art. Onisaburō Deguchi’s ceramics function not as art objects for our disinterested aesthetic contemplation so much as condensed spiritual transmissions. 

Emma Kunz and Joseph Beuys proposed art as a vehicle for healing and the restoration of balance. Nam June Paik, through his integration of shamanistic ritual and contemporary media, showed that traditional cosmologies are not opposed to technological advancement, but can reframe its purpose. Indeed, art itself is presented as a means of accessing worlds beyond conventional human experience and attuning ourselves to them: we call this a “technology of the spirit.”

Our exhibition connects these emancipatory practices to anticolonial, feminist, ecological, and anti-capitalist movements in the present. A reenactment of Seung-taek Lee’s celebrated Burning Performance (1989/2025) expands the spiritual possibilities of art by liberating it from material support, an impulse that finds new expression in the work of artists including Wing Po So and Zai Nomura. A renewed awareness that modernity’s separation of the mind from the body is damaging to ourselves and the planet is apparent in work as different as the watercolors of Suzanne Treister, the films and performances of Jane Jin Kaisen, and the “healing instruments” of I Ching Systems and Artworks. 

New commissions by Hiwa K, Anocha Suwichakornpong, and Kivu Ruhorahoza and Christian Nyampeta reflect on the persistence of the past into the present and protest the suppression of historical narratives that are inconvenient to the dominant power of the day. In these works, as throughout an exhibition which is structured by overlapping chromatic zones, is a rejection of the idea that art can exist in any perfectly “neutral” or “universal” space and a commitment to the principle that reality is to some degree constructed and contextual. That this world is more various than any one system of knowledge can account for; that this world contains many worlds. 

This is reflected in the exhibition’s commitment to forms of art that are invisible or immaterial. An extensive cinema program at Cinematheque Seoul Art Cinema, running for the duration of the Biennale, sets out the capacity of moving image to unsettle the boundaries between image and reality and to mediate between the living and the dead. A dedicated Sound Room at the NAKWON SANGGA uses sound and experimental music to move the listener out of themselves, while a performance by ORTA (Alexandra Morozova and Rustem Begenov) harnesses the unseen and ephemeral power of creativity as a means of processing historical trauma. 

This is a space for spiritual encounter, for perceptual expansion, for dreamlike communion. A space for exceptional works of art to speak, summon, and transform.

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. 

Full list of artists
Main exhibition (50 artists/collectives): Aki Onda, Amit Dutta, Angela Su, Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Anri Sala, Byungjun Kwon, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Corita Kent, Emma Kunz, Ernest A. Bryant III, Georgiana Houghton, Guadalupe Maravilla, Haroon Mirza, Hilma af Klint, Hiwa K, Hsu Chia-Wei, Hyung-Min Yoon, I Ching Systems and Artworks, Jane Jin Kaisen, Joachim Koester, Johanna Hedva, Jordan Belson, Joseph Beuys, Kara Ditte Hansen, Karrabing Film Collective, Kivu Ruhorahoza and Christian Nyampeta, Kray Chen, Laura Huertas Millán, Lucile Olympe Haute, Manuel Mathieu, Maya Deren, Mike Kelley, Minjeong An, Mohamed Gaber, Nam June Paik, Onisaburō Deguchi, ORTA (Alexandra Morozova and Rustem Begenov), Park Chan-kyong, Rafael Queneditt Morales, Rudolf Steiner, Seung-taek Lee, Shana Moulton, Sky Hopinka, Suzanne Treister, Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj, Violette e a, Wing Po So, Yin-Ju Chen, Zai Nomura

Sound Room (16 artists/collectives): Areum Lee, Aki Onda, Annea Lockwood and Ruth Anderson, Antonina Nowacka, Breyer P-Orridge, Carl Michael Von Hausswolff, Jerry Hunt, Jocy de Oliviera, Jung Hee Choi, La Monte Young, Laurie Spiegel, Li Chin Sung (Dickson Dee), Matana Roberts, Meredith Young-Sowers, Walter Smetak, Yara Mekawei

Cinematheque Seoul Art Cinema (21 artists): Abbas Kiarostami, Alice Rohrwacher, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Camilo Restrepo, Caroline Déodat, Go Takamine, Jean-Luc Godard, Ken McMullen, Lee Jang-ho, Luis Buñuel, Marcel Camus, Mati Diop, Maya Deren, Naomi Kawase, Nina Menkes, Pedro Costa, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Raúl Ruiz, Roberto Rossellini, Souleymane Cissé, Trinh T. Minh-ha 

SMB13 x Frieze Film Seoul 2025 (12 artists/collectives): Amit Dutta, Angela Su, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Hsu Chia-Wei, Jane Jin Kaisen, Joachim Koester, Karrabing Film Collective, Laura Huertas Millán, Sky Hopinka, Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj, Zheng Yuan.

Seoul Artists’ Platform_New&Young: ORTA (Alexandra Morozova and Rustem Begenov)