Three words - ghost, spy, and grandmother - will serve as the theme for the SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2014. The exhibition for the biennale will be held at two venues: the main building of the Seoul Museum of Art and the Korean Film Archive. At SeMa, the exhibition will feature works in media art, installation, film, photography, painting, and sculpture. At the Korean Film Archive, the exhibition will showcase thirty carefully selected works of iflm and video art; it will also feature a selection of installation works.

Mediacity Seoul 2014 invokes the word ghost to call upon those silenced spirits whose presence has been erased by dominant historical narratives; we want to hear them. We examine modern and contemporary history, with a focus on Asia, by calling these ghosts into our presence. Given that Asia is the birthplace of Buddhism, Confucianism, Shamannism, Taoism, and Hinduism, and that the influence of these religious and spiritual practice is still strong in the region, we also examine how contemporary artists in the region are reinventing these various traditional spiritual practices. Many of the participating artists address in their work the ambiguous attitude they or their contemporaries have toward the traditional practices and phenomena associated with ritual, mysticism, visions, awe, and the sublime. They capture in their work scenes of the modern and the traditional colliding and negotiating with each other. It is our hope that the ghosts that have been banished by science will come back to us through the reunion of media (technology) and medium (the spirit).

Spy is our keyword for alluding to the experience of colonialism and the Cold War in Asia. Given that nationalism is on the rise again in East Asia, particularly in the aftermath of the Great Tohoku Earthquake of 2011, we seek an opportunity to rethink about the very notion of modernity and its brinkmanship course as represented by this potentially catastrophic radiation disaster. Here, spy is a word that is associated not only with espionage but also with a wide range of social activities and phenomena including the democratization movement, taboos in general, regionalism, surveillance, radicalism, political exile, hacking bank computer networks, and box office success of a movie. Media City Seoul 2014 will show how the modus operandi of a media artist, who often has to interpret codes or deal with archiving and telecommunications, is similar to the modus operandi of a spy. It will also show how an artist can completely reverse the meaning of spy.

The ongoing controversy between Asian countries over the issue of the force recruitment of comfort women during World War II illustrates, once again, that women bear the brunt of the harms of colonialism and war. On the other hand, in Korea grandmother is also associated with a traditional image in which she rises to pray everyday at the crack of dawn. We want to rescue the grandmother's ardent from being buried under the easy projections of male-centered imagery and argue that the prayer of the grandmother symbolizes people's prayers over the span of millennia. Grandmothers my have been powerless against political authority, but the patience and compassion they have practiced should be re-evaluated as proactive values that ethically and politically rise above that power.

Mediacity Seoul 2014 will present a large number of artists from East Asia and Southeast Asia. The idea here is not to promote Asia as a lifeless or fixed entity, but to see it as a moving target, a cognitive lens, a rigion that is much more complex than its stereotypes. Toward these ends, artists from Arab and Western countries will also participate in the exhibition. Mediacity Seoul 2014 will feature twelve new works, the largest number of new works to be presented in the history of the biennale.

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© Mediacity Seoul