Citywide séance: Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2025 calls forth spirits and stories

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. “ThiWeiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times