Art at SXSW London: Warhol and Beeple, and Caribbean dues

The art on display at the LDN Lab show at Protein Studios and the Beautiful Collisions show at Christ Church Spitalfields, were a couple of sensational side treats at SXSW London, which even drew out King Charles for a little look-see at the Church.

Beautiful Collisions celebrated artists from the Caribbean diaspora, looking at how they have and are impacting British art and culture. Denzil Forrester’s stunning dancehall work, specially-commissioned for this, seems to spark with the spiritual surroundings but on a very in-the-body level. The King was impressed enough to speak to the artist on his visit.

But even better was the film by Zinzi Minott playing in the crypt below. Again, resounding heavily off its surroundings, it showed a history and present of conflicts within the nation, the blight of racism and the Black culture that lived on and thrived despite the hate. The images proved moving and made the current crop of far right anti-immigration ‘voices’ pitiable, just the latest in a long line of bigots, only now given a foghorn on X to bleat with.

Meanwhile, over at Protein Studios, LDN Lab immediately brought out the big guns with collection of huge wall-sized projections of Andy Warhol’s star films from The Factory days.

Nico is there, her iconic face twice your heart and drop-dead beautiful. Dennis Hopper is there, brooding and smiling devilishly as you walk over to him. And The Velvet Underground are playing, their cacophony coming through the speakers in the venue for the full blast of their druggy-industrial street love songs, Lou Reed scowling away, John Cale swiping at his viola, while a child bafflingly plays happily around Mo Tucker’s drums.

Wandering through the cavernous set of studios was to find Marin Abramovic and Marina’s AI voice both in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, which proved to be a head-spinning conversation about the limitations of AI as artists as well as a celebrate a new art world increasingly informed by tech.

Or indeed steeped in tech, in the case of Beeple, the digital artist who here presented The Tree of Knowledge, a large box in which a digital image of a future/present world dominate by a tree can be altered by the view with a dial, allowing a shift from a slide into a hellscape of information overload (AKA my Monday morning) into a long view of technological change where the present is a hiccup on a longer view.

Warhol’s early media study of people transformed into Beeple’s media study of media... such are the times.