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.
A Time in Need of Séances
The artistic directors of the Biennale – artist and filmmaker Anton Vidokle (founder, e-flux), curator and art historian Hallie Ayres (associate director, e-flux), and Lukas Brasiskis (film curator, e-flux) – have designated the ‘séance’ as the central theme of this edition, transforming sites across Seoul into stages for spirit-convenings. In French, the word séance denotes both spiritism and a film screening. That the act of summoning the absent and the projection of images from times and places not immediately present share a single term is telling. As Vidokle observes, ‘Many images and objects that we now understand as works of art largely derive from a certain commemorative, funerary impulse—an attempt to hold in memory that which is passing’—suggesting that we may not be so far removed from the age of the séance. For the Biennale, the directors have surveyed a wide field of works, spanning media art, film, painting, and installation, to investigate the role of spiritual experience in modern and contemporary art history. They mention that the recognition of colonial violence has shed light on previously marginalised non-Western art that is deeply informed by spirituality. Just as, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the yearning to escape a mechanised society manifested itself in forms of spiritualism and ritual practice, so too do artists today seek reconnection with knowledge and experience that transcend material rationalism given the rise of AI, digital automation, and algorithmic governance. This year’s Biennale features works and programme by 87 artists, performers, and filmmakers from Korea and abroad. Their works embody ritual, ceremony, meditation, and inter-species connections, gesturing towards the desired re-entangling of art with more than human worlds.
‘Of Witches and Mediums’ cluster. HEXEN 5.0 (2023 – 2025) by Suzanne Treister
TV Buddha (1989) by Nam June Paik
Seoul: Space Unfolding Through Maze and Colour
This edition of the Seoul Mediacity Biennale unfolds across a constellation of sites: the Seoul Museum of Art Seosomun Main Branch (hereinafter SeMA), NAKWON SANGGA, Cinematheque Seoul Art Cinema, and Seoul Artists’ Platform_New&Young (SAPY). The main stage, however, is SeMA, whose façade preserves that of the former Kyongsong Court, erected during the Japanese colonial era. Upon entering SeMA’s historic interior, visitors are confronted with a black, semi-transparent structure (maze, tube). This wooden passage, sheathed in tulle fabric, serves as both a physical and conceptual conduit between the museum’s previously separate galleries, sustaining a continuous exhibitionary flow. Conceived in collaboration between the artistic directors and the Hong Kong–based architectural team COLLECTIVE, the installation evokes the sense of traversing a darkened labyrinth. Emerging into the galleries, one encounters walls and floors saturated in vivid magenta, immediately arresting the eye. Here, in collaboration with COLLECTIVE and the graphic design practice nonplace studio, the artistic directors employ colour not as an aesthetic or symbolic accent but as a structural element of the exhibition itself. From Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater’s Thought Forms (1908) to Buddhist temples or Ayurvedic diagnostic methods,▼1 diverse spiritual and religious cosmologies have long assigned critical significance to colour. Drawing from such sources, the directors proclaim a new ‘Color Manifesto’. Each section of the exhibition is distinguished by hues – magenta, orange, violet, green, blue, pink – blending gradually into one another across shifting gradients. Visitors wander through these colour fields, experiencing works within an enveloping chromatic atmosphere. Selected not for symbolic meaning or visual harmony but for their perceptual effect, the colours evoke states of concentration, serenity, or intensity. Interspersed throughout the chromatic flow are black box theatres – spaces for moving-image works – that appear as if floating objects within the colour-fields.
Meanwhile, in NAKWON SANGGA, the commercial arcade for musical instruments, the cluster ‘Eurythmy’ reimagines the space as one for auditory realignment and retuning. Threads stretched across the arcades lead to sound rooms resonating with voices reminiscent of the dead, while projections, photographs, and radios transform the setting into an expansive network of spectral encounters. The emphatic identity of NAKWON SANGGA, set against these installations, underscores the sense of each work belonging to another realm. The building’s main arcade, like the labyrinthine corridors of SeMA, functions as a tubular link, seamlessly connecting disparate exhibition spaces. At SAPY, artist ORTA stages The New Genius Experience of The Great Atomic Bombreflector (2025), while Cinematheque Seoul Art Cinema hosts weekly screenings as part of the Biennale’s film programme. Seeking to extend the Biennale’s questions into the cinematic space, the directors have selected twenty-one films in which cinema itself functions as a séance medium—conjuring ghosts, ancestors, spiritual phenomena, dreams, and altered states. They say, through their extended durations, these collective screenings assume the quality of a shared ritual.
‘Practical Cosmology’ cluster. The front work is a Evaporating Symphony (2025) by Wing Po So
‘Techne’ cluster. Opening Blooming from the center; Golden Flower of Potential (2025) by Byungjun Kwon, commissioned by The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale.
New Narratives Revived from History
SeMA, which bears the scars of Korea’s turbulent modern and contemporary history, serves as the setting for the exhibition. Its courtyard and café form the point of departure, which the artistic directors have newly christened the ‘Resurrection Café’. On the opening day of the Biennale, Seung-taek Lee’s Reenactment of Burning Performance (1989/2025) unfolded in the courtyard of SeMA. An artist who has long combined land art with Korean shamanic traditions, Lee installed a sculpture in the courtyard and set it alight in a ritual performance. By immolating the material object, the artist separates art from its materiality to achieve spiritual liberation; through the act of burning – an act of annihilation – new art emerges. The flaming embers harmonise with the gesture of name the ‘Resurrection Café’. The exhibition continues with ‘Come Yesterday, You’ll Be First Tomorrow’. Here, the introductory gallery presents works by figures such as reformer and architect Rudolf Steiner, Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, Onisaburō Deguchi, Emma Kunz, and Nam June Paik; visionaries who shaped the paradigms of the worlds we inhabit today. The artistic directors explain their decision to begin with deceased artists: a séance is, after all, a conversation with those physically absent. Through their works, the departed are summoned to connect with visitors, guiding them into that liminal realm where life and death intertwine.
In the cluster ‘Of Witches and Mediums’, the exhibition turns to figures entwined with natural and supernatural worlds—witches, astrologers, and prophets. The artist Johanna Hedva, raised within a lineage of witches, presents two textile works reimagining watercolours from the eighteenthcentury spell book Compendium of Demonology and Magic. Filmmaker Maya Deren’s unfinished short The Witch’s Cradle (1944) depicts a witch performing an occult ritual. Schizophrenic mirror mise-en-scènes, figures ensnared in string, pulsing heart models, and dizzying edits draw viewers into a hallucinatory witches’ world. Suzanne Treister’s HEXEN 5.0 (2023 – 2025) unfolds across a vast rectangular table, drawing upon the format of the traditional séance. Seventy-eight watercolours derived from tarot iconography transpose its elements into the languages of contemporary science, technology, practice, and futurist discourse. In so doing, the work revives an older tradition in which science, art, and spirituality were not separate but intricately entangled.
The exhibition then progresses through clusters titled ‘Trance’, ‘Practical Cosmology’, ‘Heal the Sick, Raise the Dead, Cleanse Lepers, Cast out Demons’, ‘Techne’, and ‘Equivalent Exchange’. These gather practices we might once have dismissed as superstition—trance, occult ritual, elemental entanglement, healing, and technologies of spirit. In ‘The Dead Are Not Safe If The Enemies Win’, the Biennale underscores how cultural and political inheritances from our ancestors remain alive through spiritual practice. From diverse cultural traditions to cosmological visions, each cluster stages different articulations of the technologies of the spirit. Through these shifts in section and tone, the artistic directors orchestrate visitors’ movement between contrasting states of focus; intensity, stillness, confrontation. Audiences tune themselves to the frequencies of colour-fields calibrated to each cluster, encountering the dead of yesterday while connecting with other worlds.
The New Genius Experience of The Great Atomic Bombreflector (2025) by ORTA, performance at Seoul Artists’ Platform_New&Young (SAPY).
Performance work Sway (2025) by Jane Jin Kaisen, performance commissioned by The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale and supported by Danish Arts Foundation.
Practical Technology of the Spirit
The artistic directors say that in commissioning works for this Biennale, the artistic directors sought not merely to produce an illustration of curatorial concepts but to extend the living practices and inquiries already undertaken by contemporary artists. The film projects of Kivu Ruhorahoza and Christian Nyampeta and Anocha Suwichakornpong, or the performance Sway (2025) by Jane Jin Kaisen, which explores vast political histories through the experiences of displaced individuals and communities, continue longstanding trajectories within each artist’s cultural practice. Similarly, Hiwa K transforms his own experience of illness – healed not by modern medicine but by the interventions of a local traditional healer – into the documentary work, You Won’t Feel a Thing (2025). Such works are not ephemeral productions made solely for the Biennale but for the deepening and expansion of themes that each artist has pursued over many years. Through these varied approaches, the curators and artists alike bring audiences face to face with absent worlds, with presences otherwise beyond grasp. They name absence, give it form, and capture what lies outside its bounds—making the lost visible once again. By opening a space in which intimate superstitions, long with us through the centuries, may be encountered anew, the Biennale summons the spectral into public presence. The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, ‘Séance: Technology of the Spirit’ runs until 23 November.
‘Eurythmy’ cluster at NAKWON SANGGA. Nam June’s Spirit was Speaking to Me (2017/2022) by Aki Onda
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1 Ayurveda, an ancient traditional healing system of India, holds that in colour therapy each colour corresponds to particular organs, temperaments, and energies.
You can see more information on the SPACE No. October (2025).
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