The Seoul Museum of Art has named Irini Papadimitriou artistic director of the 14th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, the media-art biennial it has run since 2000. Papadimitriou was selected through an international open call that ran from June 3 to July 15, 2026, with a jury praising her proposal for its critical engagement with the relationships between technology, power and the future. She currently serves as exhibition director at Diriyah Art Futures in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Her winning concept, titled "Machines of Repair," frames the biennale as a space for fundamental reflection on what scientific and technological progress is actually for. The edition will revisit technologies shaped by the logics of domination and control, asking how systems built to expand communication, navigation, medicine and knowledge have also transformed warfare, accelerated resource extraction and intensified surveillance. Artificial intelligence will be presented as one of the most visible contemporary examples of this dual nature — a technology of connection that doubles as an instrument of control.

The biennale is tentatively scheduled for August 16 to November 14, 2027, with a project budget of roughly 2.5 billion won, in line with the previous edition. It will unfold across multiple Seoul Museum of Art venues, including the Seosomun branch, parts of the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art, the Paik Ground space and the Media Art Seoul exhibition platform run by the metropolitan government. The artistic director's appointment runs through December 2027. SeMA's general director, Choi Eunju, said she hopes the edition will reimagine the future of technology through art and extend that possibility into everyday life.

The appointment keeps the biennale on a technology-critical course after the 13th edition's "Séance: Technology of the Spirit," which closed in November 2025. Where that edition reached for spiritual frameworks to resist technological logic, "Machines of Repair" promises a more material inquiry — what broken systems might art help mend, and which ones deserve to be taken apart. It also places a Europe-based curator with deep Middle Eastern institutional experience at the helm of one of Asia's most established media-art platforms, underscoring how thoroughly the biennial circuit now trades in cross-regional leadership.