서울시립미술관 SEOUL MUSEUM OF ART

Hiwa K, You Won’t  Feel a Thing, 2025,  single-channel video, 22 min. Commissioned by The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale. Courtesy of the artist.

Suffering a “sharp, deep, and  ancient” pain, he seeks treatment first at a hospital and then  from a traditional healer. In telling this story, the artist questions how the corporate logics embedded in Western  medicine―“invasive, like the wars brought to Kurdistan”― have marginalized local practices. This leads to a moving  reflection on the “cold, distant gaze” of contemporary  surveillance, medical, and military technologies and the  potential of art to foster alternative perspectives and  connections.

Anocha  Suwichakornpong,  Narrative, 2025,  single-channel video,  49 min. Commissioned by The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale. Courtesy of the artist.

Anocha Suwichakornpong’s commissioned work Narrative stages a meeting between people who lost relatives  during the 2010 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators  in Bangkok and who continue to seek justice despite fifteen  years of obstruction by the Thai government. Through its  subtle interleaving of documentary and fiction,  Suwichakornpong’s film shows not only how the historical  record is constructed but how it might be contested.

Ernest A. Bryant III,  Self- Medication,  2005, wood, CRT  monitor, CCTV  camera, “African Oceanic” museum  color matched paint,  other natural  materials, 10 × 46 ×  13 cm. Commissioned by The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale. Courtesy of the artist.

Self-Medication is an interactive sculpture inspired by early  twentieth-century Kongo Nkisi figures that dramatizes the  encounter between different systems of medicine, belief, and  magic.

Ernest A. Bryant III,  Flight Jacket (Chicken  Party Flight Jacket  Potlatch. I, II, III),  2006-2008, chicken  bones, string, public  events. 70 × 50 × 10  cm. Commissioned by The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale. Courtesy of  the artist.

The multimedia installation Flight Jacket was inspired by the potlatch tradition of North America and  records an intimate, ritualistic gesture rooted in community.

The jury focused on  the award’s mission of supporting the practice of living  artists. We discussed the sociopolitical dimensions of the  curatorial theme and its relationship to capitalism and  advanced technologies, making these complex  entanglements a central criterion. With the Biennale  featuring a significant number of moving-image works, we  sought to maintain balance by not privileging any single  medium. The jury admired the You Won’t Feel a Thing work’s representation of the artist not  as “a superhuman with special talents, but as an ordinary  individual with a vulnerable body.” Its attention to the  corporate monopolization of healing also resonated with the  exhibition’s attention to the consequences of separating  material from spirit, body from mind. The jury commended the Narrative for what it reveals of the  operations of trauma and memory, which illuminated the  exhibition’s broader enquiry into film as a medium through  which to access unconscious processes. The theatrical  workshop that gives the film its structure can equally be  understood as ritual, a psychoanalytic session, and means  of alerting the audience to the mediated nature of reality. And the jury highlighted Bryant’s use of sculptural forms  embedded with monitors, prompting reflection on the  meaning of encounter. They also praised his proposal of  “another economy of generosity and sharing beyond  capitalist value systems.”