SXSW London Turns to Spanish Digital Art for Its Second Edition
South by Southwest London is returning June 1–6 with a visual arts program that places Spanish contemporary art at the center of its second edition. The festival will spread across more than 20 venues clustered around the Trueman Brewery in Shoreditch, extending its familiar mix of technology, business, and music into a more pointed conversation about how digital systems are reshaping culture.
This year’s art program, “Spain in Transmission: New Digital Work,” is curated by Patrick Moore, the former director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Moore, who is based in Madrid, said he wanted to highlight Spain’s “underrecognized” contemporary art scene and the sophistication of artists working with technology, digital culture, and historical reference.
The lineup includes Enrique Agudo, Filip Custic, Jesús Moratiel, Marina Núñez, and Molly Gochman. Four of the artists are from Spain; Gochman, an American artist, is presenting “Dispersed Geographies,” a work originally conceived for the Ukrainian Museum in New York as a 180-foot sculpture tracing the Ukraine-Russia border.
Agudo’s “You Are Beautiful” offers one of the program’s clearest examples of the exhibition’s logic. The four-channel installation draws on 3-D animation, real-time processing, and years of personal photos and videos pulled from everyday digital life. Those fragments are then translated into a Jacquard tapestry, turning computational image-making into something tactile and slow. Agudo has described the work as a kind of “non-figurative self-portrait,” one shaped less by a single likeness than by the residue of digital memory.
Custic’s new four-channel work also uses digital tools, including A.I., to consider the human figure inside a synthetic landscape. Moratiel’s “Synesthesia” uses embedded playlists and technology to create an immersive portraiture experience, while Núñez’s “Inmersión” and “Quietas” explore hybrid identities through images that shift between architecture, nature, and the human form.
Taken together, the program suggests a broader shift in how contemporary art is being framed at major cultural festivals: not as a separate track from technology, but as one of the places where its effects are most clearly felt. For SXSW London, that makes the art program less of an add-on than a lens through which the festival’s larger questions can be seen.
