The biennale took the séance as a subject and as a working method. It asked what modern and contemporary art owes to spiritual practice, and what artists have looked for in forms of knowledge that neither science nor the market recognises. Nearly eighty artists, performers, composers and filmmakers were shown across four sites in Seoul. Close to a third of them were no longer living, which made the exhibition a summoning in its own right rather than only a show about summoning.

The premise was not nostalgic. Spiritualism, theosophy and shamanic practice tend to return at moments when established ways of making meaning fail, and the biennale followed that pattern forward into anticolonial, feminist and ecological movements of the present. Treating these practices as emancipatory rather than as curiosities changes what an exhibition of them can do.

Cinema carried a particular weight here. The projected image has always been a technology for making the absent present, which is the séance’s own claim in another register, and the programme at Cinematheque Seoul Art Cinema worked that argument through moving image rather than around it.

Cosmos Cinema began from a proposition of Alexander Kluge’s, that the universe is the original cinema. The biennale took it literally. If the terms of our relationship with the cosmos condition everything that happens on earth, then cinema is not simply a modern technology but a cosmic phenomenon, and one with some capacity to recode that relationship.

More than eighty artists were shown across nine sections at the Power Station of Art. The sections moved between ancient and modern cosmologies, between astronomical observation and the systems of belief built on top of it, and between the vastness a telescope reports and the smallness a person feels on being told about it. Russian cosmism supplied one thread. It was not the only one, and the exhibition was careful not to let it become the only one.

My work concentrated on the moving image across the biennale, in the exhibition itself and in the screening programme that ran alongside it.

The exhibition argued that Mekas cannot be read through his films alone. Alongside the filmic practice ran an intellectual, organisational and often bluntly administrative one, and the second made the first possible, for him and for everyone around him.

It followed three decades from his arrival in New York in 1949: the magazine, the cooperative, the archive, the cinematheque. Mekas built the structures through which avant-garde film could be distributed, shown and kept, and he did it while insisting that film was a form of personal expression rather than an industry. Works by the filmmakers he championed and collaborated with were shown with his own, which is the only honest way to show a body of work that was never solitary.

Seen together, the letters, the ledgers and the reels describe a different kind of authorship, one that belongs as much to the institution built as to the film made.