When SXSW London lands this June, it won’t just be music and tech lighting up the capital — the SXSW London Arts Programme is set to transform Shoreditch into a living gallery of ideas, identity, and innovation. From 2–7 June 2025, the festival’s arts arm will spotlight bold interdisciplinary works, immersive installations, and some of the most electrifying names in international and UK contemporary art — all set across East London’s most iconic venues.
Expect major names like Andy Warhol, Beeple, Holly Herndon, Alberta Whittle, Denzil Forrester, and Damien Roach, alongside curator-led gatherings, private views, and immersive showstoppers. Spoiler: this is not your average art week.
Shoreditch becomes SXSW’s creative playground
From the brick-lined alleys of The Truman Brewery to the stained-glass majesty of Christchurch Spitalfields, the SXSW London Arts Programme has chosen Shoreditch as its canvas — and the results are anything but subtle.
Pass holders will gain exclusive access to curator talks, private previews, and invite-only gatherings that bring the art world’s boldest thinkers into direct conversation with the festival’s community of creators, tech disruptors, and cultural nomads.
This is art that doesn’t whisper. It collides — loudly.
Beautiful Collisions: Caribbean culture takes centre stage in Spitalfields
One of the programme’s most anticipated installations is ‘Beautiful Collisions’, curated by Beth Greenacre at Christchurch Spitalfields. It’s a vibrant, vital celebration of Caribbean diaspora artists and their enduring imprint on London’s cultural identity.
The exhibition features:
Alberta Whittle – known for her searing performance pieces and installation work.
Alvaro Barrington – with his collaborative music project Emelda’s Junction, blending art and bassline with Touching Bass’s Errol and Alex Rita.
Zinzi Minott – whose kinetic choreography has been redefining black British dance.
Denzil Forrester – whose canvas Jah Guide Shaka pulses with the spirit of London’s reggae dancehall roots.
Tavares Strachan & Runkus – bringing high-concept narrative and sound into a single breath.
This is Shoreditch storytelling at its most layered — part archive, part dancefloor, part ancestral future.
SX LDN LAB: Where AI, archives and Warhol collide
Over at Protein Studios, SX LDN LAB, curated by Alex Poots, throws us into the crossroads of art, tech, and culture. This show explores how technology reframes our sense of time, space, and reality — with a line-up that reads like an avant-garde dream team.
Highlights include:
Andy Warhol – proving once again that Pop never dies.
Beeple’s ‘Tree of Knowledge’ – an epic, generative work exploring human evolution through glitchy absurdity.
Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst – known for their AI musical alter ego Spawn, bringing sound and synthetic intelligence into harmony.
A special contribution by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Glitch Collective, grounding the project in sharp curatorial vision.
If you’ve ever wanted to see what happens when a deep-fried JPEG shares a wall with Warhol, here’s your moment.
Damien Roach debuts new site-specific work at Truman Brewery
In perhaps the most immersive offering of the week, Damien Roach will premiere ‘Grounding’, a newly commissioned audiovisual installation hosted in The Truman Brewery.
Built using generative AI and inspired by quantum physics, Grounding will reimagine landscapes as they exist between perception and code. This is Roach’s most ambitious work to date — somewhere between a hallucination, a science lab, and a meditation app in meltdown.
Expect immersive visuals, pulsing soundscapes, and the kind of contemplative weirdness that East London does best.
SXSW London: Art with an attitude
This year’s SXSW London Arts Programme proves what Shoreditch locals already know: art is not just about looking — it’s about feeling, questioning, remixing and reprogramming. And this isn’t just art for art’s sake. It’s art that collides with music, tech, politics, and community to offer something we desperately need — connection, disruption, and imagination.
Whether you’re diving into a deep-cut Warhol, vibing out to AI-generated sound, or getting lost in a dancehall oil painting, the arts strand of SXSW London 2025 promises to expand your mind without asking you to leave your postcode.
