Seoul Mediacity Biennale Names Artistic Directors for 2025 Edition

The Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) has announced three artistic directors for the thirteenth edition of theSeoul Mediacity Biennale, which is set to run August 26–November 30, 2025. The trio—artist and filmmakerAnton Vidokle, curator and art historianHallie Ayres, and film curatorLukas Brasiskis—are affiliated with the publication e-flux, which Vidokle founded. Ayres is associate director of the publication, while Brasiskis serves as associate curator of film and video.

The three were chosen following an international open call that yielded sixty-six applications. Their winning proposal suggested an “exhibition-as-séance” that moves “away from the contemporary neoliberal conception of biennial exhibitions and toward the construction of a heightened experience in which waking life is entangled with the more-than-human world.” Noting that “these ideas are connected to important contemporary discourses ranging from feminism to indigenous struggle, anti-capitalism to post-colonialism,” the trio said they planned to use “the aesthetics of spiritualism and animism to critically intervene with the dominant discourses of capitalism, materialism, post-colonialization, and contemporary technology.”

Vidokle previously served as chief curator of the Fourteenth Shanghai Biennale in 2023 and exhibited in two editions of the Gwangju Biennale, winning the Noon Award there in 2016. Ayres was also a curator of the Fourteenth Shanghai Biennale and is known for texts and lectures on the reconciliation of Indigenous and Western knowledge production through spirituality. Brasiskis, who holds a Ph.D. in cinema studies, investigates the limits and potentials of moving image media to present non-anthropocentric perspectives.

Established in 2000 as an initiative of the Seoul Metropolitan Government, the Seoul Mediacity Biennale centers on experimental new media art, gathering roughly fifty artists for each iteration.