Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2025 – spirits, rituals and the supernatural on display
The biennale summons back all the ‘dead’ stories and presences purged by Western modern rationalism, from the mystical to the transcendent
This year’s Seoul Mediacity Biennale unfolds as a vast seance – a ritual where the living seek to commune with spirits.
If its title, “Séance: Technology of Spirit”, is not a dead giveaway, the clues lie elsewhere. Nearly a third of the artists on view are themselves deceased. 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 seance 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 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.
Brasiskis added: “This modernity was imposed by colonial powers, but in certain ways, spiritual practices never stopped existing; they were suppressed or pushed underground.”
To revisit the philosophies and technologies that endured outside the Western colonial framework is to glimpse their disruptive, emancipatory potential – a force that has inspired artists to pursue visions that are feminist, ecological and anti-capitalist.