Aki Onda, Nam June’s Spirit Was Speaking to Me, 2017/2022, installation view, “Seancé: Technology of the Spirit,” 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, 2025.
When I look back at the biennials I’ve been involved in over the past two decades, what connects them is not a theme or a geography, but an experiment: an attempt to rethink what an exhibition can be.
Each time, they pose a question: How can we move beyond the museographic model of display and spectatorship to produce another kind of experience, one that changes how we perceive, learn, and perhaps even feel?
For me, exhibitions are not primarily about representation; they are instruments. Like a film, or a ritual, or a school, they organize time, attention, and relation. They can teach, move, or transform. And if they succeed, it’s not only because of what they display, but because of what they do.
The first biennial I worked on as a curator was Manifesta 6, planned for Nicosia, Cyprus, in 2006. Together with Mai Abu ElDahab and Florian Waldvogel, we wanted to reinvent the biennial format entirely. Instead of organizing another vast display of art objects, we proposed to create a temporary art school: a three-month program of study, residencies, publications, and collective production.
The idea was to shift the biennial from the logic of display to the logic of education: from showing to learning, from spectatorship to participation, from representation to knowledge production. This also meant relocating artistic production into time: into processes of research, teaching, and debate rather than static presentation.
The context was charged. Cyprus was (and still is) a divided island, split by a demilitarized buffer zone between Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities. We wanted the biennial to unfold across both sides of the city, as a gesture of contact and shared imagination. But the political climate proved too hostile. The project was cancelled just weeks before it was due to open.
It was a painful experience but also revealing. The cancellation exposed how deeply the structures of nationalism, bureaucracy, and fear still determine what can and cannot be imagined institutionally. And paradoxically, the unrealized project became more influential than many that successfully opened: a reminder that experimentation is always risky, and that even failure can have a generative afterlife.
Manifesta 6 remains, to me, a prototype: an attempt to turn the exhibition into a kind of a living organism.
Almost twenty years later, I was invited by the academic committee of the Shanghai Biennale to curate its fourteenth edition. The show I developed was titled “Cosmos Cinema” and the idea was not to make an exhibition about cinema, but to make the exhibition itself cinematic.
What would happen if we applied the tools of filmmaking—editing, montage, sound, light, rhythm—to the structure of an exhibition? Museography, as we know it, is designed for contemplation: neutral light, white walls, fixed space. Cinema, on the other hand, manipulates time and emotion. So “Cosmos Cinema” tried to fuse these two temporalities, the spatial stillness of the museum and the kinetic pulse of film, to see what kind of experience might emerge.
Montage became our method. Jointly with my curatorial team that included Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis, we curated through juxtaposition rather than theme: the proximity of works generated meaning like a sequence of shots. Visitors moved through the exhibition as through an edited film: each room a cut, each corridor a transition. Sound spilled between spaces; at times light shifted gradually or blinded the viewer with an abrupt transition from total darkness to bright light; the viewer’s own movement became part of the editing rhythm.
Conceptually, “Cosmos Cinema” was rooted in cosmism, the nineteenth-century speculative philosophy developed in Russia, which sees art, science, and technology as tools for overcoming death and expanding life into the cosmos. But the curatorial experiment went beyond cosmism as a topic. It asked how an exhibition might act as a temporal composition: how the syntax of cinema could replace the taxonomies of the museum.
The result was not didactic, but experiential: a choreography of perception. Where the traditional museum offers stillness, “Cosmos Cinema” proposed flow. Where museography freezes meaning, cinema opens it through duration and emotion. It was, in essence, an exhibition about transformation, both of images and of the spectator.
After Shanghai came “Séance: Technology of the Spirit,” the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, which I co-curated with Hallie Ayres and Lukas Brasiskis.
If “Cosmos Cinema” dealt with time and light, Séance deals with vibration and transmission. Where one was cinematic, the other attempts to show the invisible, though both shows seek to expand the sensory and conceptual vocabulary of exhibition-making.
Our starting question was: What role has spiritual experience played in the development of modern and contemporary art? Most histories of art emphasize form, critique, or social engagement. We wanted to trace a different lineage, of mysticism, intuition, and invisible knowledge, from figures like Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, Annie Besant, and Emma Kunz, to numerous contemporary artists working with ritual, sound, spiritualism, shamanism, and technology.
We imagined the exhibition itself as a collective device, or a situation for mediation between visible and invisible worlds. A séance, literally a “sitting,” is a technology of communication, a situation in which something nonhuman might speak through a medium. We tried to build such conditions into the biennial.
Color plays a crucial role in this. Each exhibition space is conceived as a distinct chromatic atmosphere: from deep violet to bright pink, from blue to electric green—creating emotional and energetic gradations rather than thematic divisions. Color functions not decoratively but experientially, recalling early twentieth-century theories of aura and synesthesia, the Buddhist understanding of color as an energy field, or Goethe’s and Steiner’s ideas of color as a living force.
“Seancé: Technology of the Spirit,” 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, installation view, 2025.
As visitors move from one hue to another, they experience subtle shifts in temperature, mood, and perception; the exhibition becomes almost physiological, an experiment in how color can modulate consciousness.
Sound and light extend this vibrational logic. Some rooms hum with inaudible frequencies; others glow or darken rhythmically. Rather than merely conveying information, the exhibition tries to generate states of attention, resonance, sometimes unease. It invites the viewer not to look at art but to be affected by it, to sense it as a form of energy.
If “Cosmos Cinema” used the logic of montage, “Séance” uses the logic of ritual. Both are efforts to activate the exhibition as a time-based and sensorial medium. Both ask: What happens when curating operates like composing or enacting, rather than organizing and displaying?
Seen together, these three projects form a kind of trilogy: the exhibition as school; the exhibition as film; the exhibition as séance.
Each one tests the boundaries of museography: what happens when an exhibition becomes pedagogical, cinematic, or spiritual rather than representational. Each displaces the viewer from the position of passive observer to that of participant, listener, or co-thinker.
I think of these as experiments not only in terms of structure, but in terms of attention. They are attempts to build environments that can show us how to perceive differently: how to inhabit time, sound, color, and image in more expanded ways. And in that sense, they also experiment with freedom: the freedom to reorganize the terms of experience itself.
All three projects, in different ways, also confronted nationalism: sometimes overtly, sometimes structurally. Manifesta 6 was cancelled because of nationalism: The idea of a show that unfolds both in Greek and Turkish Cyprus was perceived as a political threat. It revealed how fragile cultural spaces become when they touch the borders of nation-states, how quickly the language of openness collapses into suspicion, fear, and antagonism.
Years later, in Shanghai and Seoul, the pressures were subtler but still present.
There were expectations that a biennial in China or Korea should somehow represent its nation: that it should display a cultural identity, a local essence, a narrative of progress.
We resisted that.
Both “Cosmos Cinema” and “Séance” were conceived deliberately as non-national projects: planetary, cosmological, trans-spiritual. They propose that the imagination of art cannot be confined to national representation, because the experiences they deal with—time, mortality, spirit, cosmos—are not national phenomena.
And perhaps this is where the experimental approach becomes political. To refuse nationalism in the biennial context is not to deny locality, but to invent new forms of relation beyond the framework of perceived belonging. It is to affirm that artistic practices can model other kinds of affinities and commonalities: through learning, through light, through sound, through shared attention.
In the end, whether as school, as cinema, or as séance, the exhibition remains for me a site of experimentation with how we live together in time. And if these experiments sometimes fail, or provoke, or exceed their institutions, that may simply mean that they are alive.
This paper was originally delivered at the symposium entitled “Laaaaand. Curating Another Nation,” organized by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi and the American Academy in Rome, which took place at the School of Visual Arts in New York on November 11, 2025.
