The eighth edition of the international Device_art Festival, titled Transfer + Resistor (Poetic Devices / Device Poetics), opens on 29 September at 7 pm at the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb with a major group exhibition featuring twenty-seven Croatian and Korean artists and artistic collaborations. The festival programme also includes performances, artist talks, workshops, and a discursive programme that will take place throughout the duration of the exhibition, which remains open until 27 October. Since its founding in 2004, Device_art festival has explored the intersections of art, technology, and science. In this edition, the festival establishes its first extensive dialogue with South Korea, a country whose artistic and cultural landscape has been profoundly shaped by accelerated technological development as well as a long history of experimentation in media art. The festival is developed through a collaboration between KONTEJNER and the Korean curatorial collective Vestige, whose members include artist and curator Yunchul Kim and curator Jungyeon Park.

Throughout its editions, Device_art has continuously re-examined the device and the machine and their changing roles within human, technological, and environmental contexts. With the 2026 edition, this inquiry takes a new direction. Without abandoning its critical perspective, it opens itself to other modes of engagement with technology. The Croatian and Korean artists brought together in the festival approach devices as materials and active systems through which imagination, curiosity, and transformation unfold. Technology is not only something we use—it is something we are in relationship with. Art therefore does not merely question this relationship; it explores what else it might become.

On the festival’s opening day, 29 September, Korean artist Aheyon Ryu will present the durational performance White Mirror within the exhibition space on the second floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Through a live CCTV transmission, viewers are confronted with a figure dressed in a silicone “nude” suit and a rooster, playfully subverting the voyeuristic gaze associated with screens and media. Spectators initially believe themselves to be outside the scene, only to discover that the figure they assume cannot see them is, in fact, watching them. The works presented at Device_art do not treat technology as a spectacle in itself, but rather as a means of shifting perspective, disrupting expected relationships between humans and devices, and opening space for alternative experiences of reality. At 9 pm, Croatian-American artist William Linn will present an audiovisual performance exploring machine poetry through the concept of technostalgia. Drawing on quotations from poems written throughout the twentieth century, the performance reconstructs different ways in which machines entered the poetic imagination, bringing together sound, image, and poetry.

The festival presents twenty-seven artists and artistic collaborations from Croatia and South Korea: Minjeong An, Hugo Baranger, Filip Borelli, Taeyoon Choi, Tin Dožić in collaboration with Ivana Bojanić, Andro Giuni and Miodrag Gladović, Vitar Drinković, Hrvoje Hiršl, Jung Sungyoon, Nika Jurlin & Ana Sladetić, Hoonida Kim, Yunchul Kim, Ivan Marušić Klif, Kata Mijatović & Mihael Giba, Vladimir Novak, Earl Park, Aheyon Ryu, Marijana Stanić, Ujoo + Limheeyoung, Choe U-Ram, Sookyun Yang, and Haena Yoo.

At the 8th Device_art festival, devices and machines move beyond their conventional functions and become spaces for experimentation, poetic speculation, and new forms of encounter between people and their environments. Technology is not a neutral tool through which things are simply produced or achieved; it participates in what takes place: matter behaves in unexpected ways, machines respond, images become two-way, sound reveals invisible layers of space, and the boundary between the human and the technological becomes less distinct.

The kinetic sculpture Machine with Hair Caught in It by the Korean duo Ujoo + Limheeyoung comes closest to that moment when a viewer feels something before fully understanding it: a steel mechanism continuously pulls and tangles a strand of human hair, and throughout the process it remains unclear whether the machine will destroy the hair first or whether the accumulating hair will eventually stop the machine. In Talk to Me, Marijana Stanić fills an old jukebox with other people’s private telephone conversations, inviting visitors to insert a token and listen to someone’s intimacy as if selecting a song. Ivan Marušić Klif takes this a step further by connecting former video intercom screens—devices of the domestic threshold and the first line of defence of privacy—into a single system through which images travel and rearrange themselves as if the devices were communicating with one another. Earl Park constructs a monumental aura of light from hundreds of fluorescent tubes. Scientist Nika Jurlin and artist Ana Sladetić use a detector to capture particles from deep space that are passing through our bodies at this very moment, transforming them into flashes of light. Hrvoje Hiršl sets a flock of ceramic spheres in motion according to the same principles that govern the flight of birds, while Tin Dožić, together with a group of collaborators, has amplified the sounds of salt crystals and transformed them into musical instruments. Meanwhile, the wall-mounted robot by Choe U-Ram, one of the world’s most renowned kinetic artists, endlessly rearranges its own forms like a mandala continuously rebuilding itself. For the second time, following his appearance at the Touch Me festival in 2017, Zagreb audiences will have the opportunity to experience the work of the acclaimed Korean artist Yunchul Kim—this time through a fascinating and innovative transdisciplinary installation.

Since its first edition in 2004, the festival has continuously connected the Croatian art scene with selected international contexts, exploring environments in which the intersections of art, science, and technology have generated distinctive artistic languages and experimental approaches. An important part of this process has been KONTEJNER’s role as a producer of new works, with the majority of Croatian artworks presented as part of Device_art produced or co-produced in collaboration with the artists. In this way, the festival not only provides a platform for existing practices, but also actively contributes to the development and visibility of new artistic approaches to technology within the Croatian art scene.

The exhibition remains open until 27 October 2026, with visitors also able to take part in its rich accompanying programme during the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb’s opening hours: Tuesday–Friday, 11 am–7 pm, and Saturday–Sunday, 11 am–6 pm. Closed on Mondays and public holidays. A discursive programme will take place at KONTEJNER on 30 September, the day after the opening.

The Device_art festival 8.026 project was conceived and organised by KONTEJNER | bureau of contemporary art praxis. The curatorial team consists of Yunchul Kim and Jungyeon Park (Vestige), and Olga Majcen Linn and Tereza Teklić (KONTEJNER).

KONTEJNER’s partners for the festival are collective Vestige from Seoul, South Korea, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.