SEOUL.- Seoul Mediacity Biennale announced Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis as Artistic Directors of its 13th edition.

Since its inauguration in 2000 as an initiative of the Seoul Metropolitan Government, Seoul Mediacity Biennale has earned international recognition for its experimental engagement with the conditions of the contemporary, new developments in media, and the changing fabric of the city. These themes were first explored in the Biennale’s precursor exhibition, SEOUL in MEDIA, which was held three times between 1996 and 1999. Since then, the Biennale has presented twelve editions, each embodying ideas and activities that resonate with their time.

Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis’s appointment is the result of an international open call—the second time this process has been undertaken in the Biennale’s history—overseen by a committee of leading Korean professionals. Among the 66 candidates, the committee members welcomed a proposal “strategically approaching the aesthetics of spiritualism and animism to critically intervene with the dominant discourses of capitalism, materialism, post-colonialization, and contemporary technology, while extending the project’s historical continuum.” SeMA General Director Choi Eunju said, “As a representative contemporary art event of the city Seoul, I hope the upcoming edition with this team having accumulated experience and understanding on art production and distribution will create an enduring platform for a unique and expansive aesthetic experience of the Biennale in Seoul for all visitors and viewers.”

For this upcoming edition, the curators propose an exhibition-as- séance: a show that employs the mechanics of séance as a way to move away from the contemporary neoliberal conception of biennial exhibitions and towards the construction of a heightened experience in which waking life is entangled with the more-than- human world. To do this, the curators will explore and present works of art that bridge material and immaterial worlds and critically approach the present. These ideas are connected to important contemporary discourses ranging from feminism to indigenous struggle, anti-capitalism to post-colonialism. The Korean peninsula, with the richness of its belief systems, religious practices, and folk traditions, is a particularly poignant place for such a project, while Seoul itself, as a modernist city informed by spirituality as much as technology, offers a dialectical context.

Anton Vidokle is an artist, filmmaker, and the founder of e-flux. He has worked and exhibited in South Korea numerous times, including two editions of Gwangju Biennale, where he won the Noon Award in 2016, as well as a solo show at MMCA in 2019 and other exhibitions, lectures, and projects. Hallie Ayres is a curator, researcher, and art historian who has published texts and delivered lectures on the reconciliation of indigenous and Western knowledge production through spiritual belief systems, among many other topics. Lukas Brasiskis, a PhD scholar and film curator, is devoted to artists’ and experimental film. In his curatorial and academic work, he often explores the limits and potentials of moving image media to present more-than-human perspectives, a topic he discussed in his essay for Art Contemplating Crisis, MMCA Studies’ special edition in 2020, among other writings.