SPACE October 2025 (No. 695)
‘Come Yesterday, You’ll Be First Tomorrow’ cluster (left), ‘Of Witches and Mediums’ cluster (right)
‘Equivalent Exchange’ cluster (front), ‘The Dead Are Not Safe If The Enemies Win’ cluster (behind)
In Korea, where diverse folk beliefs and religions resonate with one another and intersect in uncanny ways, encounters with spiritual beings have been treated as belonging to realms deemed thoroughly unscientific and illogical. Opening on 26 August, the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale ‘Séance: Technology of the Spirit’ shifts the focus away from debates concerning the very existence of the soul, instead of attending to the human psychic dimension in which one cannot help but believe in and summon the spirit. In a land still bearing the collective trauma of unassuaged death, the Biennale proposes through the technologies of séance another artistic mode—one that embraces long-excluded forces and epistemologies while tending to historical wounds.
View of Reenactment of Burning Performance (1989/2025) by Seung-taek Lee at Seoul Museum of Art Courtyard.
‘Come Yesterday, You’ll Be First Tomorrow’ cluster. The front work is a watercolour by Georgiana Houghton, painted through her lifetime communion with spirits.
