The Seoul Mediacity Biennale will return in August for its 25th anniversary, exploring how humans have become drawn to mysticism and the occult as alternatives to a rationalist society.
The 13th edition of the biennale unveiled the theme “Seance: Technology of the Spirit,” which will evolve around artworks drawing on occult, mystical and spiritual traditions, according to the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) on Monday.
Helmed by artist and founder of e-flux Anton Vidokle, art historian and curator Hallie Ayres and curator of video and film at e-flux Lukas Brasiskis, the biennale will be held Aug. 26 to Nov. 23 at SeMA and venues across the city.
The practice of the seance — an attempt to make contact with worlds beyond the living through a medium — flourished during the social transformations of the early modernist period. This led to an explosion of popular interest in spiritism, the occult, mysticism and syncretic religion as emotional and imaginative alternatives to the stress of a rationalist, industrial society, according to curators.
“These practices and ideas would come to influence the work of myriad vanguard artists,” the curators said.
“Key to their proposal is that these alternative ‘technologies’ contest the accelerationist and rationalistic logics of capitalist modernity, and might therefore help us to resist — and reconfigure — the political and intellectual structures that shape our experience,” the museum said in announcing the theme.
The biennale was initiated in 2000 by the Seoul Metropolitan Government to explore “contemporaneity and the changes of media in the city.” Each edition featured the works of some 50 participating artists and attracted around 140,000 visitors. SeMA acquired a total of 35 works presented at the biennale for its permanent collection.
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