“Spirituality and mortality are foundational to the history of art itself,” say the curators of the Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres and Lukas Brasiskis. “Practices we now call art—music, visual culture, ritualised movement—originated within ceremonial contexts.”
Now the upheaval caused by technological advancement prompts artists to consider the mystical as counter to the “anxiety and alienation engendered by the algorithmic automation of everyday life”, a search for meaning that “resonates in Korea, as elsewhere, as a deeply contemporary impulse”, say the three curators.
The 13th Mediacity Biennale, which takes place at the Seoul Museum of Art and other venues across Seoul until 23 November, brings together 49 artists and collectives under the title “Seance: Technology of the Spirit”.
The theme “emerged organically” from the curators’ work on the 2023 Shanghai Biennale, which explored the occult and the cosmos. “We realised how many artists were already exploring spirituality and mysticism in diverse and powerful ways, yet there hadn’t been a major exhibition mapping this relationship across geography and recent history” before this edition of Mediacity.
Shamanism is experiencing a particular revival in Korea, where those indigenous vernaculars have always comingled with the dominant imported faiths of Buddhism and Christianity. Its “renaissance of sorts” comes, the curators say, “after being persecuted by occupying powers and the Korean government for many decades”.
The trio say they sought to facilitate audiences’ interpretation of shamanism through the artists’ works, such as Jane Jin Kaisen’s films of life on Jeju Island, where “shamanism becomes a language for healing historical trauma—particularly the legacy of war, occupation and political violence”. The late Nam June Paik likewise reflected Korean shamanism through how he “considered himself a kind of shaman, using media technologies as tools for global healing”, seeing “electronic media not just as a communication device but as a spiritual instrument”.
The show’s artists and collectives include Hilma af Klint, Angela Su and Hsu Chia-Wei, and takes Mediacity’s multimedia imperative a step further with sound and theatre sections. The musical instrument market Nakwon Arcade played a central role in Korean musical history, and will host a sound room plus a slate of performances.
The curators first encountered Kazakhstan’s ORTA collective last year in New York. “Their performance—part ritual, part workshop—involved the audience wearing costumes, sitting on mounds of crumpled aluminium foil, playing improvised instruments, and reciting phrases together,” they say. The project created for them a unique “sense of quiet transformation through shared ritual and collective participation”.
This marks the first time Mediacity will incorporate experimental theatre on this scale. “But this edition is very much about porous boundaries—between disciplines, between the living and the dead, between image and ritual,” the curators say. “Theatre, in this context, becomes another medium for séance.”
• Seoul Mediacity Biennale—Séance: Technology of the Spirit is at the Seoul Museum of Art and other venues until 23 November
