The 14th Seoul Mediacity pre-Biennale 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. Evolving in step with the currents of its time, the Seoul Mediacity Biennale has presented diverse modes of existence since its inception, while also dealing with both major and minor questions centered on what the terms “media” and “Seoul” mean. Through the years, the biennale has reflected upon human life and embodied artistic convictions concerning transition, expansion, and change. Along the way, its questions have continually varied around the following subject matters below, all of them functioning as distinct themes structured around their own critical concerns in each version of the biennale:
How do technology and media reconfigure human perception and experience?
What conditions give rise to relationships in an interconnected world?
How does language shape the world while simultaneously revealing the impossibility of communication?
In what ways do invisible structures and powers operate, and how might resistance be organized within them?
How are boundaries reconfigured, and in what ways can we think of the world anew?
By asking such questions, Inheriting the Future seeks to go back over the traces of past biennales while exploring the conditions and topography that will shape the coming iteration. These questions distill the historical context that Seoul Mediacity Biennale has accrued over time into several key concepts, while simultaneously unfolding before us new horizons that extend from them. 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 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 The 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. The four literary texts thus unfold not as fixed outcomes, but as compositional entities whose meanings emerge through the processes of reading and interpretation. 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.
* “Poran”, a term referring to the act of a bird incubating its eggs, serves as a metaphor for a movement toward the future, propelled by an anticipation of new possibilities.
