The Seoul Mediacity Biennale is the Seoul Museum of Art's biennial of media art. It traces its lineage to a precursor series — the SEOUL in MEDIA exhibitions, presented three times between 1996 and 1999 — and was inaugurated as a biennial in 2000 under the name Media_City Seoul, programmed as part of the Seoul Metropolitan Government's Millennium Project. The institution's founding argument was that Seoul, then in the early years of its post-industrial cultural-policy reordering, needed a continuing biennial venue at which the moving image, the digital, sound, performance and the wider media-arts field could be programmed at sustained institutional weight. Twenty-five years on, the Biennale has held to that constituting subject more consistently than any of its Asian peers.
The 13th edition, Séance: Technology of the Spirit, opened at SeMA on 26 August 2025 and ran through 23 November under three co-directors: the artist and e-flux founder Anton Vidokle (b. Moscow, 1965; based New York and Berlin), the New York-based curator and art historian Hallie Ayres, and the Vilnius-trained scholar of experimental film and media theory Lukas Brasiskis. The edition's curatorial argument took spiritual, mystical and occult traditions as forms of alternative technology — a position that draws directly on Vidokle's continuing artistic and curatorial work on Russian Cosmism and on the broader e-flux journal's ongoing engagement with the relationship between cosmotechnics and the contemporary moving image. The programme extended across the Seoul Museum of Art, NAKWON SANGGA, the Seoul Art Cinema and the Seoul Artists' Platform_New&Young, with exhibition, performance and film screenings programmed in parallel.
An institution that selects by open call
One structural feature distinguishes the Seoul Mediacity Biennale from its peers: since the 12th edition (2023), the Artistic Director has been selected by open call, a process the SeMA Biennale was the first major media-arts biennial to adopt formally. The 12th edition, THIS TOO, IS A MAP, ran at SeMA and across several citywide venues from 21 September to 19 November 2023 under Artistic Director Rachael Rakes, with Associate Curator Sofía Dourron, and the SeMA in-house Biennale team led by Kwon Jin; Annie Jael Kwan and Ong Jo-Lene served as Program Advisors. Rakes's curatorial premise was the subversion of the cartographic and the construction of a non-territorial aesthetics — a position the Korean and international press read as one of the strongest in the SeMA Biennale's recent history.
The 11th edition, One Escape at a Time, was directed by Yung Ma and opened at SeMA on 8 September 2021 after a year's pandemic postponement. The edition's premise — escapism reframed as a navigational instrument for fractured contemporary realities — drew its title from the US sitcom One Day at a Time (2017–20), and presented 58 works by 41 Korean and international artists across moving image, installation, photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, music and performance. Across its thirteen editions, the SeMA Biennale has remained one of the very few continuing Asian biennials whose constituting subject is the moving image and the wider media-arts field, rather than the contemporary art field broadly.
