SXSW London’s Art Program Spotlights Spain’s ‘Underrated’ Art Scene

London’s South by Southwest (SXSW) will host its second London festival next week, covering more than 20 venues around the Trueman Brewery in Shoreditch. Known for its fusion of technology, business and music and its focus on responding to global uncertainty, this year’s festival will also spotlight five visual artists exploring how technology is reshaping the creative industries.

After launching in 1987 as a music industry conference and festival in Austin, Texas, SXSW has grown into a major global event. While still centered around Austin, last year London became the first European edition.

The art program at the London event is titled “Spain in Communication: New Digital Works” and is curated by Patrick Moore, former director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Five artists participated: Enrique Agudo, Filip Custic, Jesús Moratiel and Marina Núñez (all from Spain), while American artist Molly Gochman brought her Dispersed geographical location From the streets of New York to installations in London. Each creates work that questions themes such as identity, boundaries, humanity and memory.

Moore, who lives in Madrid, told art news He wanted to highlight Spain’s “underappreciated” contemporary art scene.

“The Spanish art scene is very dynamic, but people abroad still don’t understand it,” he said. “There’s even a whole new gallery district popping up in Madrid that most people internationally won’t have heard of. I chose these artists because they engage with technology, digital culture and contemporary thought in very sophisticated ways, while also drawing inspiration from Spanish history.”

Moore explains that each piece is linked by a shared sense that digital systems are now part of the formation and experience of culture itself. ‘Spain in Transit: The New Digital Work’ has been curated to complement the wider technology focus of SXSW London (held 1-6 June), while also providing a different framework for discussions around artificial intelligence, systems thinking and how people relate to technological environments.

“This project aims to create unexpected connections between technology, contemporary art and cultural history,” he added.

Take Agudo’s work as an example. you are beautiful is a four-channel installation that creates what he calls “non-representational self-portraits” through 3D animated footage, real-time processing, and years of personal images and videos pulled from everyday digital life (the type of images left forgotten on iPhones and cloud storage). Through a “programmed system,” the footage is manipulated until images begin to blur, fragment, and blend together.

“I started to think that these endless archives of photos and videos might actually be a more accurate representation of who we are than figurative portraits,” Agudo, who was born and raised in Madrid, tells us. art news. “The act of distorting these digital documents may say more about who I am than just showing a picture of myself.”

After the computational process was translated into textile form, the work extended into jacquard tapestry—a richly textured loom-woven textile with intricate raised patterns rather than printed designs. Agudo explains that it is presented not as a contrast between old and new media, but as another way of keeping the same logic of the image, a way of slowing it down and making it tangible. “The transfer between systems reflects a broader concern within the program: how digital processes are increasingly inseparable from physical and material experiences,” he said.

Custic has debuted a new four-channel production exploring the natural world through digital tools, including the artificial intelligence for which he is best known. It situates the human form within a digital landscape while posing the recurring question: “Do you like being human?”

Moratier’s synesthesia Using cutting-edge technology and embedded playlists, portraiture is transformed into an immersive, emotionally charged experience that transports viewers into states that are both seductive and unsettling. Nunez’s Immersive and QuitasAt the same time, fluid, hybrid identities are explored through complex images that emerge, mutate and dissolve between architecture, nature and the human form.

“These works are not about using technology for technology’s sake, but rather about artists using these tools to express something meaningful,” Moore said.

Gochman’s Dispersed geographical location Questioning the theme of borders, originally conceived for New York’s Ukrainian Museum, it is a 180-foot-tall sculpture depicting Ukraine’s border with Russia, made from scraps of discarded building materials and countertop fragments mixed into light gray cement. “I studied images of bombed-out cities,” she told arts news, “And there’s always white dust collecting on objects.”

The SXSW London iteration expands on one of the more subtle interventions she’s installed on New York sidewalks over the past 12 months, thick strips of white vinyl. They resemble twisted crosswalk lines but are shaped like geopolitical borders. “I hope these vinyl records can be a quiet opportunity for people to wonder and ask questions,” she said. “People walking the streets of New York know about this work, but they don’t know how relevant it is to my practice.”

The works have appeared around the Ukrainian Museum in Manhattan, near the Pioneer Factory in Red Hook, and elsewhere in Brooklyn. Some have been peeled off by building managers or mistaken for graffiti, while others have remained for months, leaving “ghost” outlines when removed. “It depends on which buildings have diligent super administrators and which ones don’t,” Gochman joked.

At SXSW London, the installation will be significantly larger, spanning walls and containing three distinct borders. Unlike the anonymous intervention in New York, the festival version will include signage and background information. “This is my opportunity to stand up and explain these things,” she said. “To take this thing that I did… and create something bigger and use it to bring the community together. That’s going to be very powerful.”

Gochman hopes London festival-goers will respond to the work in a different way. “I hope kids see them as a way to play,” she said, comparing the strips to the cracks children step on on the sidewalk. At the same time, she hopes the installation will spark conversations about boundaries, conflict and collective responsibility. “I want Ukrainians to feel seen and heard,” she added.

The artist also reflects on the broader context of SXSW’s marriage of arts and technology programming. Citing the debate around artificial intelligence and warfare, she argued that technological development must be based on care, not profit. Linking her ongoing bronze series Monuments to Motherhood, she said, “The most important act we do as humans is caring. If we can remind ourselves and push AI to see humans the way a mother sees her child, then I think we’ll be in a better place.”

For Moore, the intersection between different disciplines is ultimately what the SXSW London art program aims to encourage.

“There’s an experience of saying, ‘Oh, I like this artist, I’m going to see the show in a gallery or museum,'” he said. “But it’s another thing for someone who comes from the technical world to say, ‘I don’t really have any interest in visual arts,’ and then find out that this is actually part of their world.”