Who Speaks During a Séance?
Nikolay Smirnov is a geographer, curator, and researcher, working with geographical imaginations and the representations of space and place in art, architecture, science, and everyday life. His practice focuses on analyzing and implementing complex narratives through texts and exhibitions. Smirnov studied at the Geography Department of Moscow State University and the Rodchenko Art School (Moscow). Co-curator of the projects Metageography (2014–2018), Arctic Biennale Permafrost (Yakutsk, 2016), Nikolay Smirnov participated in the main projects of the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial (2019, curator Xiaoyu Weng) and the 2nd Riga Biennial (2020, curator Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel). In 2025, Smirnov co-curates the performative workshop Liberating Esoterics? Anti-authoritarian Re-appropriation of Esotericism by Art (Casco, Utrecht, 2025), prepared on the base of his 4-years curatorial research Eurasian Alchemy. His interest in esoteric knowledges comes from the geographic studies of spatial meaning and geo-imaginations. Smirnov’s research texts are published in many collections, such as Enfleshed: Ecologies of Entities and Beings, and on the platforms e-flux, syg.ma, New Age in Eurasia and others. In 2023–24, he was a research assistant at the documenta Institut (Kassel, Germany). Since 2024, he has been a research associate at Kassel University and in the interdisciplinary Research Training Group Organizing Architectures.
Research Title Who Speaks During a Séance?
Category Essay
Edition The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale
Author Nikolay Smirnov
The English version of this essay can be found in e-flux journal #156, a special issue for the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale Séance: Technology of the Spirit.
Link: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/156/6776751/who-speaks-during-a-s-ance
It will also be available on this SMB website from mid-October.
This essay is originally commissioned for the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale Catalogue, Séance: Technology of the Spirit (Seoul: Seoul Museum of Art, Mediabus, 2025), scheduled for publication on October, 2025. With the author’s consent, it is being published in advance on the Seoul Mediacity Biennale website and e-flux Journal. No part of this essay may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author, Seoul Museum of Art and Mediabus, Seoul.
© 2025 the author, copyright holders, Seoul Museum of Art and Mediabus, Seoul.
