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

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

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

Titled “Spain in Transmission: New Digital Work,” the art program at the London event is curated by Patrick Moore, the former director of the Andy Warhol Foundation. Five artists are involved: Enrique Agudo, Filip Custic, Jesús Moratiel, and Marina Núñez — all from Spain — while American artist Molly Gochman is bringing her Dispersed Geographies installation from the streets of New York to London. Each has created work that interrogates themes of identity, borders, humanity, and memory.

Moore, who is based in Madrid, told ARTnews that he wanted to spotlight Spain’s “underrecognized” contemporary art scene.

“There’s a lot of vitality in Spain’s art world that people outside the country still don’t really know about,” he said. “There’s even an entirely new gallery district that’s emerged in Madrid that most people internationally would never have heard about. I selected the artists because they are engaging with technology, digital culture, and contemporary ideas in really sophisticated ways, while also drawing inspiration from Spanish history.”

Moore explained that each of the works is connected by a shared sense that digital systems are now part of how culture itself is formed and experienced. “Spain in Transmission: New Digital Work” is curated to complement the broader tech focus of SXSW London, which runs June 1–6, but also to offer a different framing for discussions around A.I., systems thinking, and how people relate to technological environments.

“This program is about creating unexpected connections between technology, contemporary art, and cultural history,” he added.

Take Agudo’s work, for example. You Are Beautiful is a four-channel installation that creates what he described as a “non-figurative self-portrait” from fragments of 3-D animation, real-time processing, and years of personal images and videos drawn from everyday digital life — the type of images that sit forgotten on iPhones and in cloud storage. Through “procedural systems,” the footage is manipulated until the images begin to blur, fragment, and merge together.

“I started thinking that these endless archives of photos and videos might actually represent who we are more accurately than a figurative portrait,” Agudo, who was born and raised in Madrid, told ARTnews. “The act of distorting these digital documents maybe says more about my identity than just showing a picture of myself.”

The work extends into a Jacquard tapestry — a heavily textured, loom-woven textile featuring intricate, raised patterns rather than a printed design — after the computational process is translated into textile form. Agudo explained that it is not presented as a contrast between old and new media, but as another way of holding the same image logic, one that slows it down and makes it tangible. “The move between systems reflects a broader concern in the program: how digital processes are increasingly inseparable from physical and material experience,” he said.

Custic is debuting a new four-channel work exploring the natural world through digital tools, including A.I., for which he is best known. It positions the human form within a digital landscape while asking the recurring question, “Do you like being human?”

Moratiel’s Synesthesia uses cutting-edge technology and embedded playlists to turn portraiture into an immersive, emotionally charged experience that pulls viewers into states both seductive and unsettling. Núñez’s Inmersión and Quietas, meanwhile, explore fluid, hybrid identities through intricate images that emerge, mutate, and dissolve between architecture, nature, and the human form.

“These works are not about using technology for technology’s sake — they’re about artists using these tools to say something meaningful,” Moore said.

Gochman’s Dispersed Geographies interrogates the theme of borders and was originally conceived for the Ukrainian Museum in New York, where it appeared as a 180-foot sculpture tracing the Ukraine–Russia border, constructed from discarded construction materials and countertop fragments mixed into a pale gray cement. “I studied images of bombed-out cities,” she told ARTnews, “and you always have this white dust that kind of collects over things.”

The SXSW London iteration expands on a subtler intervention she has been installing in New York’s sidewalks over the past 12 months in the form of thick white vinyl strips. They resemble warped pedestrian crossing lines but are shaped like geopolitical borders. “I wanted these vinyls to be quiet opportunities for wonder and questioning,” she said. “People walking New York’s streets know the work, but they don’t know it’s attached to my practice.”

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

At SXSW London, the installation will be significantly larger, spanning walls and incorporating three different borders. Unlike the anonymous New York interventions, the festival version will include signage and contextual information. “This is my opportunity to come out and explain what these have been,” she said. “To take this thing that I was just doing on my own… and create something much larger, using it to bring the community together. It will be really powerful.”

Gochman hopes festivalgoers in London respond to the work in different ways. “I hope kids see them as a way to play,” she said, comparing the strips to the cracks children step over on pavements. At the same time, she wants the installation to provoke conversations around borders, conflict, and collective responsibility. “I want Ukrainians to feel seen and heard,” she added.

The artist also reflected on the wider context of SXSW’s combination of art and technology programming. Referencing debates around A.I. and warfare, she argued that technological development must be grounded in care rather than profit. Drawing connections to her ongoing bronze series “Monuments to Motherhood,” she said: “The most essential act that we do as humans is care. If we can remind ourselves to push for A.I. to look at humans the way a mother looks at her children, then I think we are in a better place.”

For Moore, that crossover between disciplines is ultimately what SXSW London’s art program is designed to encourage.

“There’s one experience of saying, ‘Oh, I love this artist, I’m going to go see the show in a gallery or museum,'” he said. “But it’s another thing to be somebody from the technology world who thought, ‘I really don’t have any interest in visual art,’ and then discover that this actually is part of their world.”