Pre-Biennale: Inheriting the Future

As it prepares for the forthcoming 14th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) presents its pre-Biennale, Inheriting the Future. The Seoul Mediacity Biennale is the only biennale in Korea hosted by a museum, and serves as SeMA’s flagship international exhibition. The Seoul Mediacity Biennale has functioned as a platform for the production of contemporary art by organically bringing together the rapidly changing media environment and the dynamic nature of the expanding city of Seoul. Since 2022, however, the museum has also operated a pre-Biennale designed not only to highlight the Biennale’s ample experience within the institutional framework of the museum, but also to deepen its identity. Prior to appointing a new artistic director before the opening of every Biennale, this pre-Biennale functions as an experimental platform that reflects on the activities and trajectory of past versions while preparing for the upcoming Biennale.

The 14th Seoul Mediacity pre-Biennale has been conceived as an occasion to reread, question, and examine the conceptual evolution of Biennale themes and media practices as they have unfolded across the field of contemporary art. While exploring the Biennale on a deeper level, Inheriting the Future also symbolizes the Biennale’s potential in the form of an ovum—that is, an “egg”—and redefines its essence not as a completed statement, but as a field of perpetually generated questions. At the same time, by drawing on the rich history of the Biennale over the past three decades, this pre-Biennale metaphorically frames how the pre-Biennale is embracing the future as an act of incubation or, put another way, as an act of inheriting the future. 

Evolving in step with the currents of its time, the Seoul Mediacity Biennale has presented diverse modes of existence since its inception, while also dealing with both major and minor questions centered on what the terms “media” and “Seoul” mean. Through the years, the Biennale has reflected upon human life and embodied artistic convictions concerning transition, expansion, and change. Along the way, its questions have continually varied around the following subject matters below, all of them functioning as distinct themes structured around their own critical concerns in each version of the Biennale:

–How do technology and media reconfigure human perception and experience?
–What conditions give rise to relationships in an interconnected world?
–How does language shape the world while simultaneously revealing the impossibility of communication?
–In what ways do invisible structures and powers operate, and how might resistance be organized within them?
–How are boundaries reconfigured, and in what ways can we think of the world anew?

By asking such questions like the ones listed above, Inheriting the Future seeks to go back over the traces of past Biennales while exploring the conditions and topography that will shape the coming iteration. The exhibition is composed of 14 works by nine artists, including pieces previously presented in past Biennales, as well as works from the museum’s collection and newly invited works. Grounded in existing contexts, yet testing the conditions of articulation within a new environment, these works encompass curatorial visions and discourses accumulated over time, unfolding as aesthetic practices that seek to transform unrealized and unrecognized histories from the past into future possibilities. 

The reading performance is another key element that, together with the exhibition, constitutes Inheriting the Future. This effort to bring to the surface sensations long submerged beneath the many layers of meaning surrounding the works is further expanded through texts read aloud in the exhibition space, including four literary worksㅡPlato’s Symposium, Kim Tae-yong’s Kokdu: A Story of Guardian Angels, Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, and Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question. The four texts thus unfold not as fixed outcomes, but as compositional entities whose meanings emerge through the processes of reading and interpretation. Summoning the events of different times condensed within artworks, Inheriting the Future operates as a receptive structure where public sensibilities intersect and are generated anew.

Please visit the Seoul Mediacity Biennale website for further information.