The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale: Séance: Technology of the Spirit

The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, titled Séance: Technology of the Spirit, opens in August 2025. The biennale was founded in 2000 as a space to engage with new developments in media and the changing fabric of the city. Exhibitions and programs are centered at Seoul Museum of Art, and there is an itinerant and multiform pre-biennale program that is designed to preview the show in varying locales while also presenting the permanent collection of the museum. 

This edition of Seoul Mediacity Biennale is being organized by Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres and Lukas Brasiskis of e-flux, who curated the Shanghai Biennale two years ago. On that occasion they elevated the status of the moving image – even giving the biennale the title Cosmos Cinema. As they state, their plans for Seoul include structuring a film program so that it is not just a parallel screening series, but actually operates as an extension of the exhibition.  

From an engagement with Cosmism to the idea of a séance, which likewise suggests an upward trajectory, though this time through the spiritual. Cinema is once again an animating concern, and this extends to the positioning of technology in the conceptual framework of the biennale. We spoke with the team about continuing on from their work in Shanghai, what they are developing for Seoul and why there need not be a distinction between art and life.

Two years ago, in 2023, you all worked together on the Shanghai Biennale. Now you move on to Seoul. Can you compare the art scenes in the two cities? What methods did you operate with in Shanghai that might be generative for you in Seoul?

Anton Vidokle: China and South Korea are profoundly different in terms of culture, history, and social structures, so it doesn’t feel accurate to draw comparisons between them. In both cases, our focus hasn’t been on the “art scene” as such, but rather on learning how the themes we’re working with intersect with local histories, philosophies, cosmologies, and artistic practices. This is always a complex process, especially given the limited time – less than a year – to research and prepare a biennial. The volume of knowledge is vast, and navigating it requires a steep and focused learning curve.

Hallie Ayres: To that end, we’ve been focused quite intensely on understanding the Korean context as it relates to the themes of our exhibition. The Korean peninsula is extremely rich in belief systems, religious practices, and folk traditions – which makes this the ideal setting for an exhibition of this sort – but we also wanted to understand how works that deal with these themes will be received by the general audience. We spent quite a while educating ourselves on the complex history of Korean shamanism, for example, and the team at Seoul Museum of Art even arranged for us to see a gut ceremony while on a research trip to Jeju island.

What unique spatial opportunities and challenges are you encountering at Seoul Museum of Art as you build your exhibition?

Ayres: In Shanghai, we were working with a setting that has a very distinct character: the Power Station of Art used to be a power plant. Seoul Museum of Art occupies a former courthouse, but it has been entirely renovated as a white-wall museum setting. Since part of our curatorial premise for this show is to produce an “exhibition as séance,” we’ve tasked ourselves with really transforming this white-wall space into an exhibition that feels completely different from a standard museum show. To that end, we’ve been fortunate to work alongside COLLECTIVE, a very talented architecture firm based in Hong Kong. We can’t reveal too much before the opening, but together we devised a scenography that tries to emulate the feeling of stepping into different realms that exist among our physical realm – the same sort of experience envisioned when tapping into alternative spiritual and metaphysical flows of energy in séances.

We’re also using color in a very particular way in the exhibition space. Color, light, and sound have always been used to particular ends in the practice of séances, and varying ideas around color theory have been around since antiquity. Goethe had his famous color theory, as did Aristotle and Ptolemy; Isaac Newton; Rudolf Steiner; artists associated with Bauhaus like Kandinsky and Albers; Le Corbusier; etc... In ancient Egypt and China, “color halls” were used for healing. Ayurveda is based on balancing energies inherent in the color spectrum. Color also holds symbolic meaning in Buddhism, among other religions. We are planning to incorporate color into the exhibition along these lines: color not as something purely aesthetic, but as an instrument that has psychological, physiological, and spiritual impacts. In short, color as a tool with decidedly material effects.

One last note on the physical space of the Biennale is that we’ve been fortunate to find a few off-site venues throughout Seoul that will also be crucial components of the show. For example, we’re collaborating with Nakwon Arcade to devote individual rooms to artists with important sound or music practices, and we’ll also install a dedicated Sound Room there, curated by our colleague Sanna Almajedi. Nakwon Arcade is one of the largest instrument shopping malls in the world. During the late 1970s and 80s, the surrounding area was also home to a vibrant club scene. This was concurrent with the economic boom in Korea, which included the development of the entertainment industry, so there was a spike in demand for instruments and music equipment. Apparently musicians used to hang out in the Arcade in the evenings and wait for nightclub and venue managers to call in need of a spare back-up guitarist or drummer to fill in for performances that night. So there was a whole ecosystem around this building. We’re really excited to include it as a venue, especially since sound and music are such critical components of spiritual practice. The Sound Room will also host a performance program throughout the run of the exhibition.

Last time out you referenced the word “cinema” in the title and theme of your show. This time you curate the Seoul Mediacity Biennale, which is part of a subset of biennales explicitly dedicated to media art or new media. What are your thoughts about the inclusion of moving image art in visual art biennales in general? What sort of intervention do you want to make in this biennale in regards to exhibiting the moving image? 

Vidokle: There are actually quite a lot of biennials dedicated to media, moving image, and art-and-technology practices – they’re just not always as visible or widely discussed. The Seoul biennial was renamed Mediacity in the late 1990s as part of a municipal campaign to rebrand the city as a “media city” – a kind of image refresh. The name didn’t really catch on, but the biennial kept it. I think there was also an idea at some point to use digital billboards across the city to show artists’ work – something a bit Blade Runner-esque. In practice, though, if you look at its history – say, the first edition co-curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2000 – it wasn’t especially media-focused. We recently revisited the catalogue and were struck by how current and relevant that show still feels.

At this point, the inclusion of film and video in contemporary exhibitions is no longer a novelty. It is no longer the 1970s or 1980s, when curators questioned whether video was art. I once heard that during a past edition of Documenta, video works had to be “smuggled in” by embedding monitors into wooden sculptures so they’d pass as objects. That kind of resistance is long gone – the art world has changed.

Lukas Brasiskis: As someone who curates and researches artists' films, I’m definitely interested in how the integration of cinema into exhibition-making has evolved beyond medium specificity. I agree with Anton that, today, what matters more is the kind of epistemologies and perceptual experiences that moving images can generate. For us, the question is not whether film belongs in a movie theater or museum, but how to foreground its affective and transformative potentials – especially when dealing with themes like séance and technologies of the spirit.

The title of the Seoul show is Séance: Technology of the Spirit. Cinema is often thought of as a séance, in both setting and format. How do you imagine the “exhibition as séance,” and how will you put that into practice when building the show?

Vidokle: For us, it’s essential that the form and method of the exhibition reflect the subject matter it engages with. We were recently in Tokyo and saw the Hilma af Klint exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The works themselves are visionary and radical, but the museography was completely conventional. It could have been a Picasso show. The format didn’t correspond at all to the spiritual, experimental nature of af Klint’s practice. That disconnect not only misrepresents her work, but also misses the opportunity to deepen public understanding of what she was trying to do.

So, in Seoul – as we did in Shanghai – we’re trying to find a form that resonates with the ideas we’re working through. In Shanghai, we worked with montage to organize the show, using it to structure the exhibition as a kind of cinematic space. In Seoul, we’re thinking about the exhibition as a séance – something immersive, experiential, and attuned to a different logic. That intention extends across everything: the curatorial structure, the design, the sound, the typography, the materials.

Brasiskis: As Anton says, the séance, for us, is both a metaphor and a method. It’s a way to think about presence and absence, visible and invisible, conscious and unconscious, but also to create an exhibitory model that resists linear narrative and didactism. Drawing from cinema, psychoanalysis, and spiritualism, we’re approaching the exhibition as a space where perception is altered and where different spatio-temporal logics – ancestral, subconscious, animistic – could coexist. Practically, this means experimenting with space, colors, and installation architecture inspired by the artworks themselves. Working hand-in-hand with COLLECTIVE, and the designers NONPLACE Studio, we want visitors to the Biennale to feel as if they’re entering an altered perceptual realm rather than just following an explanatory text. 

Ayres: As part of our research for this exhibition, we had the privilege of visiting Rudolf Steiner’s archive and the Goetheneum, in Dornach, Switzerland. Steiner’s life work was centered around the idea that there should be no distinction between life and art: that a daily practice invested in art (among other things, like education and agriculture) could allow for an understanding of the ways in which our material realm and the spiritual realm are intrinsically intertwined. The village surrounding the Goetheneum is still committed to this ideal: people live in houses designed according to anthroposophical aesthetics; they cultivate gardens and drink bio-dynamic wines; they even have a hospital that still practices Steiner’s vision of holistic healthcare that incorporates eurythmy and art therapy alongside modern medicine.

When we think about devising an “exhibition as a séance,” we hope to impart the idea that there need not be a distinction between art and life. The works in the show speak to this as much as our curatorial premise hopes to underscore it. Hopefully visitors to the show will emerge from it experiencing reality in a slightly new way – a metaphysical change similar to how one feels after watching a film or participating in a séance.

Regarding the subtitle, tell us more about the idea of “alternative technologies.” What is a technology of the spirit, when we might possibly be at the dawn of an age of sentience in artificial intelligence?

Vidokle: I don’t think we can say yet that AI is sentient – or even intelligent in the way the term implies. Right now, it’s closer to an automaton, a concept Franco “Bifo” Berardi writes about a lot: a machine that automates processes and often accelerates authoritarian tendencies. We’re already seeing how algorithmic systems are contributing to rising nationalism, populism, and social fragmentation. The danger is that computational technology today is so powerful that it risks becoming totalizing.

In response to this, we’re seeing a renewed turn among artists and thinkers toward spiritual, esoteric, and mystical frameworks – much like at the end of the 19th century, when new technologies also sparked metaphysical inquiries. The word “technology” comes from the Greek techne, meaning art. Yuk Hui’s idea of “cosmotechnics” suggests that technology is not a universal concept – it can be shaped by different cosmologies. There are many ways to understand and practice technology beyond rationalism or automation. For us, this is a key point: there is an urgent need to imagine alternatives to the automaton.

Ayres: Similarly, there’s also an urgent need to expand our colloquial definition of technology as something that is limited to a computer, a circuit board, or machine learning, for instance. We’re invested in understanding both artistic practice as well as spiritual practice as forms of technology – but not the kind of technology that depends on the extractivist logics of industrial capitalism. In fact, these alternative forms of technology can be a means of subverting Fordist regimentation and anti-rationalism.

Something else that we’re hoping to refute is a sort of dogmatic distinction between spiritualism and science. In many cases, the two actually crave each other as a means of legitimation, yet the ideologues of the early modern period were quite strident about pitting them against each other. So it’s important that, when we talk about alternative or new technologies, we’re not talking about practices that are obscurantist or reactionary. For us, a technology of the spirit is inherently not a mechanical or financial technology, but a technology with social and political aims.

The last press release announces that a major film program will be organized as part of the biennale. Can you tell us more about what you have planned? 

Vidokle: The challenge is to structure the film program so that it’s not just a parallel screening series, but actually operates as an extension of the exhibition – projected into the space of cinema. The cinematic apparatus has a kind of totalizing effect: once you’re in a dark room, seated in front of a screen, everything becomes cinema. So the question for us is how to reflect on that experience – how to draw a connection between the space of cinema and the world outside it. Which one is the dream? Which is the reality? Is it possible to reverse their relationship?

While working in Shanghai, we came across a beautiful story by Zhuangzi, a classical Chinese thinker who dreamt he was a butterfly. When he awoke, he didn’t know whether he was a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. That disorientation, that metaphysical uncertainty, is very close to what we hope to evoke.

Brasiskis: Cinema has long been understood as a form of séance (in French it can mean a screening) – a place where absent presences reappear. As Jacques Derrida observed, film can make the dead appear more alive than the living. Therefore, from the outset, we intended for the cinema to become an integral part of the biennale and agreed with the Seoul Art Cinema, one of the city's most significant venues for cinephilic culture, to present a special film program in their theater. The program will consist of four thematic chapters: Speaking with the Dead, Ancestors Breathing, Psyche and the Screen, and Everyday Mysticism. The selected films explore cinema’s capacity to mediate between the material and spiritual realms, invoke ancestral presence, navigate the subconscious, and expose the sacred within the everyday. 

The screenings will take place every Saturday throughout the duration of the biennale, and, as Anton says, we are also developing a performative frame to expand the cinematic experience beyond the movie theater setting and link it more closely to the exhibition’s broader spatial and conceptual architecture.

Can you tell us about your publishing plans? Are you exploring an alternative way of approaching printed matter?

Ayres: Right now we’re in the midst of working on a catalogue, jointly with inimitable editor Ben Eastham and design studio NONPLACE. It was important for us to use this opportunity to commission catalogue essays that speak specifically to this relationship between spiritual and artistic practices. I studied art history, and much of orthodox art history doesn’t acknowledge this relationship. This is partly because of general prevailing suspicions around new religions or spiritual and healing practices that are outside dogmatic religious tradition. But it’s also partly due to the fact that the prevailing history of modernism depends on linearity, and many spiritual practices are rooted in folkloric beliefs or alternative medicines that were viewed as contrary – and even oppositional – to modernism. So, for a long time, it was unfashionable and a bit taboo to acknowledge the profound impact that mystical and occult beliefs had on art history. To that end, we really hope that the texts in the catalogue could play a role in suturing this division.

What does your artist list say about the way you work and the type of artists you are drawn to?

Vidokle: Our colleagues at the museum told us that 29% of the artists in the show are deceased. That’s not incidental. The séance, at its root, is a method of communication with the dead. So this is a curatorial gesture – not one of nostalgia or mourning but of dialogue, trying to think across time and to engage with practices that may have been neglected, forgotten, or are still resonant today.

After summoning the spirits of the deceased artists you are working with, what do you think they will tell us about the world we live in today?

Ayres: Part of the popularity of séances – beyond the desire to reconnect with loved ones – hinges on the notion that the dead might be able to impart some sort of sacred knowledge about the machinations of the universe that is inaccessible to those of us who currently occupy the realm of the living. This sort of knowledge has a liberatory potential. In fact, the Fox sisters, who are responsible for the spread of spiritualism in the US, initially held their séances in the home of Amy and Isaac Post, radical Quaker abolitionists whose house also served as a station on the Underground Railroad. So, strangely enough, there has always been this linkage between speaking with the dead and emancipation.

However, this question presumes the existence of death. Death itself is a bit logically and ethically senseless. Perhaps the deceased artists in the show are really not deceased at all but simply inhabit different planes than our waking life.

This year’s Seoul Mediacity Biennale unfolds as a vast séance — a ritual where the living seek to commune with spirits unseen.

If its title, “Séance: Technology of Spirit,” isn’t a dead giveaway, the clues lie elsewhere. Nearly a third of the artists on view are themselves deceased. And many, in their lifetimes, sought to speak with the other side through their practice: Hilma af Klint, Georgiana Houghton, Onisaburo Deguchi, Emma Kunz and even Nam June Paik.

Yet ultimately, the séance here is more than an invocation of the dead. It stands as a metaphor for summoning back all the “dead” stories and presences long purged by Western modern rationalism — the supernatural, the mystical, the ancestral, the subconscious and the transcendent.

“The advent of modernity imposed this widening chasm between science and spiritual practice. This was especially true in East Asia, as well as in other parts of the world,” said Hallie Ayres, one of a trio of curators alongside Anton Vidokle and Lukas Brasiskis, at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), the biennale’s primary venue.

“This modernity was imposed by colonial powers, but in certain ways, spiritual practices never stopped existing; They were suppressed or pushed underground,” Brasiskis added.

To revisit the philosophies and technologies that endured outside the Western colonial framework is to glimpse their disruptive, emancipatory potential — a force that has inspired artists to pursue visions that are feminist, ecological and anti-capitalist.

The biennale opens with a punchy image overhead: Johanna Hedva’s monumental textile prints of a demonic avenger, entwined with snakes and bearing a severed head in her hand. The illustration is drawn from an 18th-century grimoire, “Compendium of Demonology and Magic,” whose title page offers a sinister warning to the uninitiated: “Noli me tangere" (Do not touch me).

From there, visitors pass through a long, dark fabric tunnel and emerge into a gallery of early abstractions that resist the standard narrative. Modern art’s turn to abstraction has often been framed as a declaration of creative independence from external influences — art purely made for its own sake.

But here, it reveals itself otherwise: Georgiana Houghton’s “spirit drawings” were guided by angels and saints; Hilma af Klint’s paintings were born as commissions from the “High Masters;” and Emma Kunz’s geometric diagrams were designed as tools of diagnosis and healing.

Meanwhile, across the globe, Onisaburo Deguchi, a mystic who cofounded the new Shinto religion Oomoto in Japan, conjured thousands of tea bowls by hand, charging the clay with spiritual energy and an aesthetic sensibility distinct from the austere traditions of Raku ceramics.

And decades later, Nam June Paik blurred the boundary between spiritual meditation and new media in “TV Buddha,” where a statue of Buddha contemplates its own image on a television fed by a live camera.

Taken together, these works sketch an alternative history of art, where it is a passageway and a conduit to other worlds.

This opening section feels like where the biennale’s strength seems to lie the most, both conceptually and visually. But the exhibition has plenty more to offer as it delves deeper into themes of transcendence and healing.

Some dwell on states of trance, reminding us that the boundaries of consciousness and reason are far more porous than we are taught to believe, as in Joachim Koester’s video “Tarantism.”

Others turn to humanity’s violent impulses — our exploitation of other species and our mindless destruction of the very environment that keeps us alive. Yin-Ju Chen’s “Extrastellar Evaluations,” for instance, views such threads of darker human history through the lens of an alien intelligence and characterizes them as a gross “misalignment” with the cosmic order.

Ascending the stairs, visitors encounter how these tendencies might be redressed through ancestral rituals or alternative modes of healing. Bodies are healed, spirits are recalibrated and the line between enlightenment and applied science is reconciled.

The final chapter of the show reaches into a decolonial reckoning, indicating the destruction of Indigenous traditions under Western imperialism. It reminds us that the dead — and the histories they carried — do not vanish with their bodies, but persist, haunting and shaping the worlds we inhabit today.

In Korea, memories of political scandals involving presidents entangled with religious charlatans or dubious shamanistic rites have left some wary of the mystical when it appears in public-funded exhibitions like the Seoul Mediacity Biennale.

But the curators insist such history does not need to close doors for meaningful exploration.

“Any kind of technology can be used to heal or to damage. Spiritual practices are not an exception,” said curator Vidokle. “As much as they can carry emancipatory potential, for healing potential, we also know religion has been misused in a very damaging way. Our approach is not an endorsement of any particular practice, but an inquiry to their plurality.”

Ayres added, “The exhibition also proposes to weaken the tether between spiritual practices and new obscurantism, where these practices are used toward the goals of resurgent nationalism or bolstering state projects for violent ends.”

Beyond the Seoul Museum of Art, the biennial spills into the city, filling Nakwon Sangga, Cinematheque Seoul Art Cinema and Seoul Artists’ Platform_New&Young with satellite shows, film programs and performances.

The Seoul Mediacity Biennale runs through Nov. 23.

Cassie Packard How did you arrive at the theme of the 2025 Seoul Mediacity Biennale, ‘Séance: Technology of the Spirit’?

Hallie Ayres It grew out of a show we curated, the 14th edition of the Shanghai Biennale, ‘Cosmos Cinema’ [2023–24]. One of the ‘chapters’ of that show was called ‘Partial Eclipse,’ named after a Kazimir Malevich painting. It featured works that attempt to parse the mysteries of the universe through occult practices. This is such a rich field of artistic practice; we realized it deserved a show of its own.

Anton Vidokle I became fascinated with this topic as an art student. I was writing a report for an art history class on the spiritual paradigm in modernist abstraction and came across the catalogue for an incredible show that took place at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the mid-1980s,‘The Spiritual in Art’. That’s how I learned of Hilma af Klint. Since that time I’ve wondered why explorations of the relationship between contemporary art and spiritual practices are virtually absent from art historical scholarship and the landscape of contemporary exhibition-making.

For me, one of the biggest discoveries of ‘Séance’ was the work of Georgiana Houghton, a British-Australian mystic who started making abstract paintings in 1861. She said she was channeling something – a bit like af Klint. Initially, she was trying to speak with her dead sister, a painter, in the hope that her sibling would continue to make art through her. It’s astounding that this story is missing from canonical art history. 

CP I imagine that grief and trauma have a hand in many spiritual technologies. For example, I think about how spiritualist photography was popularized in the US around the time that families were grieving young men lost to the Civil War.

AV It’s true that a lot of this art is intertwined with trauma: personal trauma, war trauma, occupation trauma, colonization trauma. Practitioners were often looking to heal themselves or balance energies.

HA I also want to specify what we mean by ‘technology of the spirit’. These mystical and occult practices should be conceived as technologies, but specifically, technologies that exist in opposition to extractivist, capitalist or financial technologies. They offer a way of mitigating the alienation that those other technologies provoke.

CP Which technologies of the spirit feature in the show? Did you include any local shamanic practices?

AV Absolutely. The situation in Korea, is, of course, specific. Shamanism was repressed by Japanese colonial occupation, and after the country gained independence, Korea also repressed shamanist tradition because they saw it as backwards. More recently, in the 1980s, it was embraced as a form of indigeneity that was specifically Korean. But then a lot of people exploited or commercialized the idea. 

HA Today, there is K-occult in the same way that there is K-pop. It’s a whole genre; some of the biggest blockbuster movies in Korea in the last few years have been about shamanic practices, or geomancers or communicating with the dead. It is a ripe moment to propose an alternative to this kind of commercialization. At the same time, in the 1970s Nam June Paik was already discussing shamanism in relation to his own practice, which was largely invested in exploring new media and forms of technologies.

AV Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys, both of whom referred to themselves as shamans, are very historically important for our project. Their bodies of work speak to one another.

Lukas Brasiskis Jordan Belson and Maya Deren are also important, as filmmakers with very different spiritual intentions and backgrounds. Belson, who made moving image works using various complex analogue techniques, sought a way to replicate Buddhist meditation practices through film. Deren, meanwhile, was interested in ritual and the unconscious from an early feminist perspective. We also included artists like Shana Moulton who explore the commodification of spirituality. It’s important that we have different angles on the connection between art and spirituality, especially when art is being produced to sell an idea of spirituality.

AV There’s also a therapeutic dimension here. Are you familiar with Emma Kunz? She was a Swiss healer and medium who made amazing drawings that were not meant to be artworks; they were intended as instruments of healing. Hallie connected with a group of people in Massachusetts called I Ching Systems and Artworks who likewise make objects that they view as healing instruments. This is printed matter made using certain colours and forms, and other types of objects. There’s no mechanism in them, no machinery.

CP How do the curation and exhibition design reflect these themes?

AV A commonality we found among these groups is that they tend to think about colour as an energetic field rather than something purely aesthetic.

HA Colour has psychological, spiritual and even physical effects on the body. This won’t be a standard white-wall exhibition; we’re going to use colour in a specific way in the exhibition design, incorporating colours that, in spiritual practices, have capacities to impart change in the body. 

LB Our curatorial principle takes the séance as a method and a metaphor. ‘Séance’, which comes from the French word for ‘a sitting,’ became popular in the mid-19th century – first referring to spiritualist séances reconnecting the dead with the living, and later to psychoanalytic and cinematic ones. In a sense, all three forms of séance engage with absence and can be understood as responses to the disorientation of the modern subject. We are interested in the séance as a means of accessing the unconscious, as well as a form of collective and restorative ritual. Drawing from that, we approach the exhibition as a space where perception is altered, and where different spatio-temporal logics – ancestral, subconscious, animistic – can coexist.

AV This is just the beginning of something. The subject is so vast; we're just scratching the surface. To really be comprehensive, there would need to be many shows – or something even bigger. We hope that people don't perceive this show as a totalizing proposition. It's more like a conversation opener.

The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale is on view at various venues from 26 August to 23 November

The biennial-as-séance only works when the spiritual world collides with the ‘real’ world

What’s a biennial these days if it doesn’t take something you think you do know and prove that, in fact, you don’t? In the last Venice Biennale that ‘something’ was foreigners or the idea of foreignness; here it’s spiritualism, which the contemporary cynic might associate with hippies, counterculturalists in general, the religiously devout or those who wish to immerse themselves in any reality other than the one we’re stuck in now. In this exhibition, however, which features work (most of it housed within the Seoul Museum of Art – SeMA) by 50 international artists and collectives, spiritualism is reconstituted as a science rather than a delusion, and as the very foundation of modern art. Because if art is a spiritual practice, then like spiritual practices in general it’s a means of attempting to know or at least understand the world, which, as far as this biennial is concerned, is what art’s supposed to be about. You might even call that optimism.

Yet the symbol for this is drawn from the world of the fantastic: Wamidal, a cat-faced, goat-legged demon depicted in a giant reproduction (from a German eighteenth-century grimoire) suspended from the ceiling of SeMA’s lobby, births dragons out of her gaping vulva (she’s holding it open to ease the process) while flames lick out of her ears. She leers at visitors grotesquely, her sagging teats dangling over her potbelly, as they proceed into a darkened space that announces the show proper. SeMA is housed in a modern building tastefully slid behind the facade of Seoul’s former Supreme Court. In this context, Wamidal appears rather like a leather-clad dark-metal fan flaunting their tattoos while sipping tea in a fancy hotel: all surface; fancy dress. But it does remind visitors that the artistic armature of this exhibition, curated by Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres and Lukas Brasiskis, collectively of e-flux, is, despite its internationalism, firmly grounded in the arc of Euro-American art history. Strangely, given the subject matter, South Asia is a notable blind spot. The subcontinent, from which so many spiritual practices were birthed, is represented by Amit Dutta alone, whose films are on show at Nakwon Sangga, a shopping centre for musical instruments that also houses the biennial’s fascinating satellite exhibition of audioworks in a darkened listening lounge.

Once inside the exhibition space at SeMA we’re confronted with more reproductions, this time of philosopher, social-reformer and self-proclaimed clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner’s blackboards (produced during lectures about anthroposophy – a belief in a perceptible spiritual world accessible by thought), which document the Austrian occultist’s quest to find a spiritual science. ‘Imagination’, ‘Inspiration’, ‘Intuition’ intone the words on one of these dramatically spotlit, vaguely diagrammatic scrawlings, which look like a cross between colour charts and Venn diagrams, this one dated 19 February 1922. A wall text, emphasising the works’ status as a détournement of the received wisdoms of Western art-history, suggests that they in fact represent ‘an action painting of the mind’. Nevertheless it’s not entirely clear what audiences are supposed to make of Steiner’s ‘works’, beyond inhaling the faint but entirely imaginary whiff of pedagogy and chalk dust.

And so we breeze on through, out of the darkness and into the bright light of a pink-walled room, which triggers disturbing echoes of the anatomy Wamidal was recently showing off and, less disturbingly, further builds an art-historical foundation for what is to come with works by nineteenth-century British artist and spiritualist Georgiana Houghton (spirit drawings that she allegedly made via the guidance of angels), turn-of-the-twentieth-century Swedish mystic and artist Hilma af Klint (guided by a spirit to create a temple), early-twentieth-century Swiss healer and artist Emma Kunz (geometric mapping supposedly indexing healing energies) and a collection of more obviously Christian prints from the 1960s by American Sister Corita Kent. Collectively these works introduce one of the biennial’s central theses: that art is a means by which to search for patterns in an otherwise disordered and nonsensical world. To emphasise that, the biennial is divided into a technicolour display of brightly coloured ‘zones’ (covering the walls and floors) that leave you feeling like you walked, Dorothy-style, into a colour-TV test card.

At this stage there are other emerging thematics too: that abstraction in art developed not as an aesthetic revolution but as a spiritual revolution; and relatedly, that abstract art was not a rejection of the world, but an attempt to understand it. Which, a cynic might say, is an attempt both to recognise and to formulate a response to the more general paranoia that surrounds artistic practice today: is it actually useful, important or even relevant to the world in which it resides?

So, a display case of decorative ceramic cups by twentieth-century religious leader (cofounder of the neo-Shintoist Oomoto religion) Onisaburō Deguchi, each of which was apparently made, following his release from imperial prison in 1944, while reciting a prayer channelling god’s will, is presented as a ceramic chunk of the divine, evidently wearing the disguise of a practical drinking vessel. It’s hard to look at the cups, with Onisaburō’s most famous catchphrase – ‘art is the mother of religion’ – rumbling through your head, without some degree of bemusement, however beautiful they may be. As with many of the previous works, the medium is not the message. That’s in the supporting materials of captions and wall texts rather than in the objects in front of you.

Unless, that is, you’re looking at Suzanne Treister’s HEXEN 5.0 (2023–25), a tarot deck of 78 watercolours in which, for example, The Fool (normally symbolising a leap of faith) is represented by the blockchain with its associated technologies, benefits and drawbacks, all neatly housed in a wheel of fortune. It’s these types of works, in which the spiritual world collides with the ‘real’ world, that make the themes of the biennial seem more urgent and more alive.

This comes to a head most vividly and urgently in Hiwa K’s You Won’t Feel a Thing (2025; one of the biennial’s newly commissioned works), a 22-minute human-scale (as opposed to cosmic-) video narrative recording the Kurdish-Iraqi artist’s treatment for kidney stones. The video follows his diagnosis in a Western-style medical facility and, faced with surgery, the second opinion he sought and the noninvasive cure he received from a traditional healer (who uses his ‘laser’ eyes as a surgical tool to break up the stones), who charges a lot less than his ‘modern’ counterparts, is, according to this narrative, extremely effective and is consequently being harassed by the forces summoned by that ‘modern’ medicine and the capitalist system in which it is enveloped. Crucially, the video opens with shots of the artist attending to his farm, connecting to the land; a reminder that even for spiritual practices, some grounding in context is important. It’s a message that works such as the Karrabing Film Collective’s video The Family and The Zombie (2021; which examines the impact of settler colonialism) also emphasise, perhaps as a cautionary note to contextless gatherings or zones of equivalence that form the general bedrock of largescale exhibitions such as this one.

A dialectic similar to that proposed by Hiwa K is at play in Thai filmmaker Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Narrative (2025), a 49-minute video that indirectly centres on the April–May 2010 killings, by government forces, of pro-democracy protesters in Bangkok. The work contrasts Buddhist rituals of commemoration with what appear to be role-playing therapy sessions for relatives of the victims of the massacre (but are actually, we are told in an accompanying text, rehearsals for another movie about a fictional trial of the perpetrators of the killing), who, 15 years later, remain trapped in a labyrinth of legal bureaucracy that appears to be expressly designed to prevent them from obtaining justice for their loved ones. Just as much as the participants in the video are performing justice, so too the justice system in which they are mired seems little more than a performance on the part of the Thai authorities. And naturally, the Buddhist rituals are a type of performance too, just as ‘rehearsal’ might, in this context, be figured as a training for and understanding of life. What you so clearly walk away with, at the end of this work, is the idea that whatever the world is, it’s made up of multiple histories or narratives, only one of which is our own. Which might, despite the exhibition’s attempts to tie everything together, be a summary of this biennial as a whole.

The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale: Séance: Technology of the Spirit, Seoul Museum of Art and other venues, through 23 November

This year’s edition, titled Séance: Technology of the Spirit, is curated, following an international open call, by Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres and Lukas Brasiskis. Vidokle is an artist, filmmaker and the founder of e-flux. He has worked and exhibited in Korea numerous times, including two editions of Gwangju Biennale, where he won the Noon Award in 2016, as well as a solo show at MMCA in 2019. Hallie Ayres is a curator, researcher and art historian who has focused on the reconciliation of Indigenous and Western knowledge production, among other topics. Lukas Brasiskis is a scholar and film curator who often explores the limits and potentials of moving-image media to present more-than-human perspectives.

ArtReview How do you think what you’re doing fits in with the particular history of the Mediacity Biennale? Is it about media, as the overarching title of the biennial might suggest?

Anton Vidokle When we started working on this project, we came to Seoul and we saw the catalogue of the first edition of Mediacity Biennale, which is actually super interesting. Two things really were quite striking. One is that it was actually a very, very good show with a lot of artists who are still very relevant and very interesting today (and this was 20 years ago or more). The other is that it wasn’t necessarily a media show. There were all kinds of work. I think the initial idea was to have some media boards in the city, because at the time the municipality of Seoul had this idea to rebrand the city as a media city. Since then, this was dropped, but the biennale got stuck with the name.

AR And yet moving image and new media are the language that most people speak today.

AV I think for us this is great, because we love moving image and we’re really fascinated with moving image works, but of course this is only maybe 30–40 percent of the exhibition. The rest of it is all different genres, from painting, to performance, to music, without a particular emphasis, I think.

Hallie Ayres When we talk about media, it’s as much about mediation, and this legacy of mediation is an expanded methodology of exhibition-making – what an exhibition can or should do. Which I think is something that we definitely thought a lot about and is why we’re doing this exhibition as séance, using séance as a metaphor for this exact type of mediation.

Lukas Brasiskis ‘Séance’ is a kind of metaphor that is driving that theme of exhibition, but it is also a method. What really interested us was that séance has this history, the use of the French word is very related to the spiritualist movement in the nineteenth century, but then it became used in a different context, still with a similar logic: gathering or sitting are the origins of the word, in French.

It was not only the spiritualist attempt to speak through the medium to the dead, but it became very important for the transference of psychoanalysis, and that’s more of a connection to the subconscious realm still operating in a logical séance. Not long after that, cinema séances became very popular alongside different theatrical performances.

For us, it’s basically a kind of a connection between the present and the absent that really informs the way we thought about the artists, but also how we create the space for artworks to be exposed.

AV The word séance, the way it’s used in English, is like one thing, but actually it’s a word that’s used in many languages, including all of the Eastern European Slavic languages; French, of course, etc. It’s a peculiar word because, like Lukas was saying, it can refer to anything from an entertainment-type situation, like a theatre play, a circus performance, to psychoanalytic therapy, to post-traumatic treatment, and things like that. It’s really quite unusual. When I was growing up, you called going to a circus going to a circus séance, for example.

But it starts even before spiritualism. It starts with Franz Mesmer. I think these strange sessions that he was organising in Vienna with water and magnetism: for some reason, people started referring to them as séances.

It’s really quite strange, but we like this as a model because it allows us, in the exhibition, to work with many different registers, from something that is very analytical or historical, to something that is almost dreamlike, to something that comes close to a state of trance. Somehow it permeates all of these different registers of interacting with art, let’s say.

AR Your subtitle – technology of the spirit – contains two nouns that people wouldn’t necessarily put together.

AV It’s true. Except that the word technology comes from the Greek techne, which means art. So perhaps it’s not necessarily an oxymoron or a paradox.

Yuk Hui’s ideas are very useful in this regard, in particular on cosmo-technics. The idea that there are many different technologies – as many as there are cosmologies in the world – and many different concepts of what a technology is. Through the works in the show, we’re trying to make an argument for other types of technologies that are not necessarily about an iPhone or that automatic-device type of approach, but related to other ways of being in the world.

AR How much of that is a response to the emergence of AI?

LB In terms of what Anton said, it’s like these other alternative technologies, we consider them as nonextractive ones. It’s not necessarily a response to AI; it’s more almost about thinking outside of an extractive capitalist logic. AI, I think, is not at the moment a very big part of that logic.

Of course, it’s related to AI. This was maybe our point of departure, because a lot of ideas came from just looking at how uncannily similar historical moments are: the moment we’re living in now and the moment about a hundred years ago at the advent of modernism. Because what actually drove so many artists and intellectuals towards the occult, mystical, all sorts of syncretic religions and stuff like that, was a feeling of being oppressed or alienated by the very rapid transformation of life due to industrialisation and industrial capitalism. It was just reshaping life brutally and really rapidly along very, very rigid paths.

I think we’re living through something like this again with AI: the digitalisation of everything, algorithmic automation of everything, it produces a lot of anxiety. People feel that they will be replaced by machines, lose their jobs, etc. It’s not a surprise that we see, again, this proliferation of artistic practices that engage with the metaphysical, engage with the mystical, or the occult. I think this may be a very similar reaction, because maybe the historical moments are a little bit similar.

HA Also, at this historical moment, the advent of modernity, these kind of spiritual practices, or folk traditions, or healing remedies, or rituals were seen as the exact opposite to the modernist project. In some ways, it’s the reinvigoration of opposites, with this wave being conjectured as some sort of way out of something that’s engendered by AI.

AR You have quite a few dead artists in the exhibition. How does that work with the séance theme?

AV In a couple of different ways. Partly, it was important for us to approach this a little bit historically, just because of what we were talking about before – that we feel that we’re actually in an analogous period – so it’s very interesting to ground it or contextualise it in the first iteration of this kind of moment. We were able to get some incredible works. For me, the big discovery was Georgiana Houghton. Her work was rediscovered relatively recently – in particular there was a show at the Courtauld Gallery [in London in 2016]. She was this British woman who lived much of her life in Australia actually, but in 1861 she started making abstract paintings out the blue. It’s completely unprecedented. She could not have seen them anywhere else, because nobody would make these kind of images for another 40 or 50 years. This is 50 years before Hilma af Klint or Kandinsky or Malevich, or anything like that.

She basically said or wrote that it started with the death of her sister, who was an artist. Then she heard from some other spiritualist mediums at the time that they were putting down what they saw in their séances as works of art, as drawings, and she tried to do the same. She tried to get her sister to work through her, but that didn’t work for some reason. The sister did not want to engage in that way.

In the end, she ended up channelling all sorts of Renaissance artists, but they didn’t make Renaissance-type work, they actually made abstract paintings. They’re incredible when you see them, because they’re made without any corrections. This is really eerie. It’s almost like the person knows exactly where every line, every colour, every stroke goes. It’s inexplicable. I’m not a religious person, and I’ve never met a ghost or anything like that, but when you see something like this, it really makes you wonder, how is this possible?

Onisaburo Deguchi is another key figure in the show. He was a Japanese mystic spiritual leader. He co-invented this religion called Oomoto, which was very, very important in Japan in the 1920s. It had a gigantic following. Then at the end of the war he suddenly made 3,000 small ceramic teacups that are incredibly beautiful and totally groundbreaking, because they go completely against the whole tradition of Raku ceramics and Japanese austerity. They look like Matisse paintings in a strange way, but this is done in 1945, when Japan was in ruins after the bombing of Hiroshima. It’s also a completely inexplicable production. Of course, this isa small part of the show, but it’s a kernel around which everything is built.

HA Thirty percent of the artists we’re showing are deceased.

AV Artists never die. Their work is there to speak for itself. You don’t even need a séance.

The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Séance: Technology of the Spirit, is on show at the Seoul Museum of Art and other venues in Seoul through 23 November

Sound is having a comeback, especially at the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, where Sanna Almajedi’s program explores sound as a critical component of spiritual practices. Rituals are often accompanied by chanting, singing, instrument-playing, and movement, which are central to their dissemination and survival. Think of instrument burning or dance bans as tools to undermine religious and spiritual practices, for instance, and how components from these and other spiritual traditions become revived and re-disseminated through artistic and cultural practice. Sometimes, artists reignite interest in practices and sounds that have lain dormant, or bring their elements to larger or different publics. Almajedi’s program explores these reinterpretations and will mostly take place in the Sound Room, void of physical artworks, at the biennial’s secondary location Nakwon Arcade, and will feature established artists including Aki Onda, La Monte Young, and Genesis P’Orridge, as well as younger artists Yara Mekawei and Areum Lee. Fittingly, it is the largest shopping mall for instruments in the world.

Hosted in Korea’s Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), as well as the secondary location, the biennial, which opened on August 26^th, Séance: Technology of the Spirit, proposes an “exhibition-as-séance,” or a mediation to map modern and contemporary artistic practices’ relationship with spiritism, the occult, mysticism, and syncretic religions. Veering from the usual label as co-curators, Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis, all from e-flux, who also curated the Shanghai Biennale Cosmos Cinema, two years ago, have chosen to call themselves artistic directors. Perhaps, as a gesture to re-focus on the art and artists they are presenting instead of their position. The word ‘curator’ is at once watered down for its use beyond the art world and in the art world, trivialized for exceeding its demand. Either way, in Seoul, the trio has continued their inquiry heavily through the lens of video art.

Ahead of Seoul Art Week, opening on Wednesday, our writer Lily Kwak tapped Almajedi (who by the way, is also from the e-flux team) to talk about self-playing instruments, the history of modernism, and the poetics of radio art.

-Anna Mikaela Ekstrand

Lily Kwak: I find this year’s Seoul Mediacity Biennale curatorial framework generative in its mapping of local histories, philosophies, cosmologies, and artistic practices. What was your entryway in, and what thought processes guided the frames you set for the performance program?

Sanna Almajedi: I was invited to curate the Sound Room for the Biennial in December, and I immediately thought of Hilma af Klint, who was both a spiritualist and an abstract artist. I began researching Spiritualism, a movement that originated in upstate New York, as well as musical séances, which were mid-to-late 19th-century concerts where audiences would witness pianos playing without a visible person or trumpets floating in the air. It was both entertainment and a way to receive messages from spirits. I also thought of artists like Anri Sala, who has a famous work with self-playing drums that hang upside down from the ceiling. He’s participating in the Seoul Mediacity Biennale but not with this particular work. There have been a few works like this lately, one at the Whitney Museum.

LK: Nikita Gale. Also, Julius Eastman and Glenn Ligon’s show at 52 Walker.

SA: It’s a trend in the art world. There are many artists I thought of when I first started researching, and we [the e-flux team] considered incorporating archival materials and objects, but we decided it would be more valuable to create an experience focusing on sound. There are no objects in the room. Sound is the main artwork and the main subject.

LK: The curator, Maurice Tuchman, reoriented the history of modernism in the 80s around the spiritual, occult, and religious practices that abstract artists like Agnes Martin were inspired by, which had been latent in part due to its political associations, including Nazism.

SA: When I started drawing a timeline of abstract art, Fluxus, and then more contemporary works, I began thinking about spiritualism as a movement inspired by Buddhism and shamanism. It became a much broader subject when contextualized within Seoul, where shamanism is not only relevant to folk art, but also to the works of many contemporary artists that are defining what a shaman is, their role within society, and how they can be caretakers or mediators between us and other worlds.

LK: The Sound Room is hosted in an off-site venue to the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), the Nakwon Sangga Arcade. How did the spatial and conceptual architecture of this venue inform your program?

SA: Nakwon Sangga is one of the oldest and largest instrument shopping malls in the world. It formed in the sixties because there were already vendors outside, just like many buildings in New York City, like Essex Market, started. Then, with the economic boom and the increasing cultural investment in Korea in the 60s and 70s, nightclubs and cafés grew in the neighbourhood. That meant more music instrument shops moved into the building. Musicians used to post up there and wait to be called to play a gig. Even in the Joseon Dynasty, this neighborhood was an entertainment area. The city wanted to tear it down in 2007, but the people protested. This is also why we didn’t want to put objects in the room, because the arcade is already filled with objects.

LK: The biennale is not interested in showcasing technologies dependent on the extractivist logics of industrial capitalism, but in expanding the definition of technology to artistic and spiritual practices. Right now, digitalization, algorithmic automation, and the deployment of artificial intelligence is transforming our means of production and communication, and is inextricably intertwined with populism, nationalism, and fascism. Then there is of course a recurring affective and perceptual response to these new technologies, and a returning interest in spiritual practices in contemporary art. How does this context inform how you’re thinking of technology, or technē, in regards to your curatorial program?

SA: What was most fascinating to me is how artists appropriated technology, in this case to communicate with spirits. The radio and recorded music largely changed the way we relate to sound and hear our surroundings, just like photography changed the way we look at the world. Artists and researchers used different radio frequencies to detect voices. The Swedish researcher Frederick Jorgensen wrote a book in 1964 called Rösterna från Rymden, which means “voices from space.” When he used a tape recorder and a microphone to record birds, he listened back to his recording and detected his mom’s voice. He then developed a methodology where he’d ask questions, wait for a response, and listen back to the recording at a lower speed to hear the spirit’s voice. Later on, upon the advice of one of his spirits, he began using a radio to conduct séances. The psychologist Constantine Radus developed this method and coined the term Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP), a methodology to speak with the dead using recording devices. Now there’s websites that will sell you EVP devices, and ghost hunters use them.

LK: It’s interesting to think about how people have conceived of contemporaneous technologies’ relationship to consciousness and the divine, from chance divination to combinatorics, and so on. The shift from modes to frequencies, in terms of how ancient Greek philosophers and Western musicology categorized specific musical modes and argued their conductivity to harmony, to the divine, and thereby its significance to ethics, politics, and cosmology, is interesting as well. Tell me more about how you homed into upstate New York.

SA: Yes, exactly. I researched the world’s oldest and largest spiritualist community called Lily Dale. It’s a lone village, and everybody who lives in it is a medium.

LK: Is this close to where Spiritualism is claimed to have originated, with Kate and Margaret Fox in 1848?

SA: Yes! There’s a documentary on HBO called No One Dies in Lily Dale from 2010. Many people who lose their loved ones visit their mediums, but I think some of the mourning is related to the fact that they killed Native Americans and their spirits were haunting them. Native American imagery is very present within these communities. There is a Native American medium who used to live in Lily Dale as well.

LK: That’s interesting. Anton had told me that the Post family in Rochester, who took in the two Fox sisters, were abolitionists and women’s rights advocates.

SA: I didn’t know that!

LK: To return to frequencies, I’m interested in Aki Onda’s 2023 work in the program, Transmissions from the Radio Midnight Part 1. Onda brought a handheld AM/FM radio and cassette recorder on his travels across four continents over the course of twelve years, recording conversations over the air (in Swedish, Arabic, Spanish, Polish, French, Korean, and some English), then collaging the frequencies. How are you thinking about his work in reference to your program?

SA: Aki Onda is very influenced by Nam June Paik. Aki is part Korean and was very influenced by shamanism from an early age and has also done research on EVP [Electronic Voice Phenomenon]. He did a residency in 2010 for at the Nam June Paik Arts Center and was surrounded by the works of Nam June, with whom he felt he had a close kinship with. While he was in a hotel room, he shuffled through radio stations and found a cryptic message that he translated as a message directly from Nam June to him. That’s when he began performing séances to communicate with Nam June over the span of several years and in different continents. Aki once told me that radio is an electromagnetic phenomena sending waves through short and long distances. Light and sound are the same, and their frequencies can be used for transmission. The essence of séance is sharing energy, a phenomena that we experience and feel. Nam June also used shamanistic rituals to honor his colleagues when they passed away, like George Maciunas and Joseph Beuys.

LK: I love the polyphony in Aki Onda’s Transmissions, and the idea that the semantics are lost in translation. There are these blind female shamans in Japan’s Mount Osore called itako, whose material voice plays a significant role in facilitating mourning, rather than the words uttered. Onda calls his composition “sound poetry,” which heightens the significance of the aural textures of language, as well as its perceptive and affective powers, which is how I was attuned to language for a long time. I’m also curious about Onda’s ritualized practice of listening to the radio late at night while traveling, and I’m wondering how you think about the rituals involved in performance-making, and the role that performance plays in numerous kinds of rituals, whether cultural, religious, political, or legal?

SA: I think listening is, in itself, ritualistic. It’s a practice you have to learn, from what we decide to tune into and block out in everyday life. It’s cultural, but also a concept that, for example, Pauline Oliveros famously wrote about in her book Deep Listening. She says, “Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening.” Listening is also a huge part of Annea Lockwood’s practice. Her compositions are just a fragment of her practice, because her rituals in upstate New York, where she lives, consists of going to the river by her house, dropping a microphone into the water, and spending hours just listening. It becomes a meditative practice.

LK: About half of the works you’re presenting are by artists now-deceased, so you’re staging dialogues between artists across time, but it seems you’re furthermore interested in more direct transmissions with the dead explored by artists using new technologies of mediation, in Annea Lockwood and Ruth Anderson’s works, for example.

SA: Ruth brought Annea to the United States when she was working at Hunter College. They were partners, and in 1973, when Annea first moved to the US, they started having lengthy phone conversations. Ruth was secretly recording them, and she made a collage of excerpts of them laughing and saying sweet, endearing words to each other. She made this composition and gifted it to Annea privately a year later. When Ruth passed away, Annea did a similar thing, where she collaged fragments of their conversations with field recordings from Ruth’s resting place. Lockwood recreates the intimate acoustic relationships the couple once shared using sound to conjure the texture of life and emulate the enduring presence of love beyond death.

LK: Thinking about the sites that Onda traversed, and collected scraps from, for his Transmissions project, as well as Lockwood visiting Anderson’s resting place, how do you think about sound’s connection to land? Native Americans believe the drum to be the heartbeat of Earth. In Hindu cosmology, the Om is a primordial sound that created the universe, with all existence beginning through vibration.

SA: Every culture has instruments created specifically for their spiritual practices. Aki Onda has a performance that uses a collection of bells. Apparently, he has thousands of bells. Many of the artists in the program use indigenous practices within their contemporary work. For example, La Monte Young uses the gong in his work. Jocy de Oliviera’s piece, Raga in the Amazonia, takes concepts from raga to create an ode to the Amazon rainforest. While it’s not traditional Indian music, she uses its sentiment or spirit to create an emotional conversation about land through ecological themes. Walter Smetak, a Swiss artist, spent his whole musical career in Brazil, and he created instruments influenced by indigenous instruments, using PVC pipes and natural material to create surrealist-style instruments. There are many indigenous instruments from South America used to communicate with the dead too, like flutes from Peru. I didn’t want the show to become ethnographic, however. There’s a very interesting discourse around how to present sound without making it about something else. Some of the most major sound art exhibitions have been just about “sound art” rather than about a specific topic. They say, “These are artists who are contemporary, but they use sound.” That’s like saying, “These are artists that use painting.” I didn’t want to take away from the sound being the actual artwork.

LK: Though there is increasing foreign interest in Seoul’s contemporary art scene, this is a biennial that the Seoul art world and general public will largely witness. Seoul is interesting in that it’s a capitalist city with huge corporations like Hyundai funding the arts at a global scale. This biennale began in 2000 as part of the government’s Millennium Project, which implicates the city’s motivations in establishing itself at the helm of technological innovation and cultural production. Korea is a pawn of the US, especially since the end of the Korean War, but at the same time, ancient and traditional systems continue to structure everyday life and are embodied by the people. How do you think about this context, and second, how are you thinking about the dialogue with the audience that your program might prompt?

SA: The Nakwon Center, built postwar, is a symbol of Korea’s investment in culture. Karaoke and DJ sets make up a huge part of contemporary Korean culture, but I think the fact that this venue still exists is an example of how Korea holds on to its past. Contemporary Korean artists are also very interested in shamanism, its history, and how to incorporate technology with ancient practices. I’m looking forward to bridging a transnational dialogue.

The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale Séance: Technology of the Spirit is open through November 23, 2025.