Poster image of the 14th Seoul Mediacity Pre-Biennale 《Inheriting the Future》 ⓒ SeMA
The 14th Seoul Mediacity Pre-Biennale 《Inheriting the Future》 is being held at
Nam-Seoul Museum of Art, on view through July 5. 《Inheriting
the Future》has been conceived as an occasion to reread,
question, and examine the conceptual evolution of Biennale themes and media
practices as they have unfolded across the field of contemporary art.
《Inheriting the Future》 seeks to trace the
remnants of past biennales through the questions that have continuously evolved
as the biennale reflected on human life and gave form to artistic convictions
surrounding transition, expansion, and change. Through this process, it aims to
explore the conditions and terrain that shape the biennale to come.
In doing so, this creative platform for exploring the unknown
takes shape in the dual forms of visual art and literature, as well as
exhibition and performance, traversing both Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA)’s 2026
institutional agenda of “creation” and its exhibition agenda of “technology.”
The exhibition is composed of 14 works by nine artists,
previously presented in past biennales, as well as works from the museum’s
collection and newly invited works. Grounded in existing contexts, yet testing
the conditions of articulation within a new environment, these works encompass
latent curatorial visions and discourses accumulated over time, unfolding as
aesthetic practices that seek to transform unrealized and unrecognized
histories from the past into future possibilities.
This effort to bring to the surface sensations long submerged
beneath the many layers of meaning surrounding the works is further expanded
through four literary texts, with Plato’s Symposium, Kim
Tae-yong’s Kokdu: A Story of Guardian Angels, Herman
Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, and Isaac Asimov’s The
Last Question cutting across time and space to speak of existence and
the world while standing in as proxy questioners of the themes brought about by
past Biennales.
The reading performance is another key element that, together
with the exhibition, constitutes Inheriting the Future. Due to its performative
nature, the act of reading aloud generates different sensations each time
depending on the person who is reading and the conditions in which this is
carried out, revealing complex layers surrounding the action itself that cannot
be reduced to a single meaning.
Summoning the events of different times condensed within
artworks, 《Inheriting the Future》 lays claim to,
through reading, the endlessly proliferating possibilities of newness. Together
with the act of reading aloud, the exhibition operates as a receptive structure
where public sensibilities intersect and are generated anew.
