SXSW® London 2025 Arts

Listening List

Welcome to Jamrock by Damian 'Jr. Gong' Marley

Half Way Tree by Damian 'Jr. Gong' Marley

Distant Relatives by Damian 'Jr. Gong' Marley & Nas

Survival by Bob Marley

Exodus by Bob Marley

Catch a Fire by The Wailers

Burnin' by Bob Marley & the Wailers

Mind Control by Stephen Marley

Revelation Pt. 1: Root of Life by Stephen Marley

Revelation Pt. 2: Fruit of Life by Stephen Marley

Rock the World by Determine

Freedom Chant by Determine

Mi Go Through Dat by Determine

Teacher's Back by Vybz Kartel

Gangsta Blues by Tanya Stephens

Sweet and Nice by Marcia Griffiths

Gangsta for Life: The Symphony of David Brooks by Movado

Right Time by Mighty Diamonds

Satta Massagana by The Abyssinnians

Marcus Garvey by Burning Spear

Reading List

Jamaica Pulse: Art and Politics from Jamaican Diaspora
Ed. Kat Anderson

Felix Gonzales Torres
Ed. Julie Ault

A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging
Dionne Brand

The sound of culture
Louise Chude-Sokei

Create Dangerously: the Immigrant Artist at Work
Edwidge Danticat

Art as Experience
John Dewey

The Book of Enoch
Enoch

The Artists' & Writers' Cookbook: A Collection of Stories With Recipes
Natalie Eve Garrett

The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Alex Haley

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls
Saidiya Hartman

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
Saidiya Hartman

All About Love: New Visions
bell hooks

A Small Place
Jamaica Kincaid

zami: a new spelling of my name Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde

I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings
Audre Lorde

The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life
Drunvalo Melchezidek

Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives
Janet Neary

Bodies of Water
Astrida Neimanis

The Natural Way to Draw
Kimone Nicolaides

God is Dead
Nietzsche

Of Sirens, Body & Faultlines
Nat Raha

Citizen: An American Lyric
Claudia Rankine

The Creative Mind
Rick Rubin

Existentialism is Humanism
Jean-Paul Sartre

The Wise Mind of His Imperial Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie I
Ed. Prince Ermias S. Selassie

In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Christina Sharpe

The Rose That Grew from Concrete
Tupac Shakur

An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque
Krista A.Thompson

Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice
Krista A.Thompson

Ezili's Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders
Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley

On Being Human as Praxis
Sylvia Wynter

Damien Roach, Grounding

Günseli Yalcinkaya

Introduction (quotes selected by the artist)

"It is often said that scientific instruments simply extend our senses. This is not true... They transform the very nature of what it is to see and to know."
Bruno Latour (‘Visualisation and Cognition’, 1986)

"To see things differently, to see things as they are and not as they are said to be—that is the only reality."
Ursula K. Le Guin ('The Dispossessed', 1974)

"The future must be built, but in order to build it we need to be able to see it."
Mark Fisher ('Ghosts of My Life', 2014)

"Everything changes and nothing remains still: you cannot step twice into the same stream." Heraclitus (circa 500 BCE)

In Damien Roach's Grounding, an immersive audiovisual installation that debuts at SXSW in London, he looks to the counterintuitive ideas described by quantum physics to help unpack our preconceived everyday notions of reality, emphasising the urgent need for new ways of seeing outside of our current system – to unlock a new level of the real, if you will. Drawing on scientific concepts such as superposition, where particles can exist in multiple states at once on a subatomic scale, as well as the vastness of deep time, these observations transcend the ordinary world of appearances, moving beyond our five senses into the impossibly small realm of atoms and particles, or to the inner world of our own consciousness. The ever-changing qualities of quantum phenomena suggest that nature isn't static but instead built on an interconnected network of dynamic interactions. Adding to this the scientific and philosophical concept of emergence, which explains how complex wholes emerge from simple parts, Grounding invokes the transient, fleeting and fluctuating nature of land, matter, and the environment, comparing it to the equally unstable ecology of the networked digital image.

Set to a soundscape produced from environmental field recordings extended and reinterpreted by Roach using generative AI audio systems, the installation consists of a never-repeating constellation of image and sound depicting natural phenomena, which aims to evoke all manner of states and possibilities, the seen and unseen. Using bespoke datasets, esoteric custom models and locally-run AI software applications, the animations flicker through their various iterations, which Roach likens to the visual equivalent of vinyl crackle, in contrast to the impenetrable hyper-fluid aesthetics that characterise the evolving arc of AI's generative visuality. Borrowing the algorithmic eye of generative media, computational modelling becomes an analogy to describe quantum measurement, where the latent space of AI evokes Hilbert space, a complex state of potentiality, containing all possible outcomes simultaneously – this is what informs the ever-fluctuating system-like environment of Grounding.

The installation's title, 'grounding', is a term used in generative AI. It describes the relationship between datasets and reality – enabling AI systems to connect abstract symbols to their real-world meaning and contexts. Implicit in this is the normative Western worldview - based on Renaissance ideas of mimesis - that sees images as accurate depictions of indexical reality. Whether it's a photograph or AI-generated media, these 'technical images' shape reality – they don't just reflect it. For German media theorist Vilém Flusser, the "pseudo-magical" quality of these technologies makes it increasingly hard to separate what's real and what's an algorithmic abstraction, computation or simulation. In the context of machine learning, the system senses the shape and feel of a thing and assigns it a position within a model. Its results are fundamentally nonlinear and emergent, albeit still informed by its dataset's implicit biases and limitations.

In her Document essay 'Hallucinating sense in the era of infinity-content', writer Caroline Busta traces the mainstreaming of generative AI as a fundamental change in the way that we process information. "What if there's something deeper, older, even organically emergent that has been nudging us to perceive and communicate in a fundamentally different way and 'machine learning neural networks' are, rather, answering that call?" she asks, hinting at a higher-dimensional potential of these technologies that skewers the pre-existing frameworks we use. It's true that the way that generative AI transmits information has most certainly reshaped how we organise and experience the world, a defining characteristic of any emerging technology.

Against an onslaught of images, the algorithmic apparatus itself becomes an observing body, remixing patterns that exist but cannot be perceived through the direct input of our senses – of time, space, and taxonomies. What does it mean to see a forest as an ever-changing entity instead of a fixed concept? What if we could unlock the wisdom of a plant to connect us to deeper forces outside the normal limits of perception? 'Grounding' compares these shifts to the new perspectives offered by past technologies, such as long-form satellite data visualisations, time-lapse photography, and X-rays, each unlocking new ways of seeing the world that were previously imperceptible to us, as articulated by Joanna Zylinska in what she has termed 'nonhuman photography'.

As machines become increasingly intelligent, and as we discover more about material reality, the idea that humans are separate and siloed from the rest of nature grows more insufficient. We could say that the human effort to capture and replicate reality is less a search for truth as it is an amplification of the human desire to conquer, to see the world in one's own image. Life, with a capital L, includes all kinds of non-human entities – animals, plants, minerals, objects – whose existence is everywhere. In Critical Zones (2020), Bruno Latour describes this relationship as follows: "The small – the bacteria – holds the big – the atmosphere – while the big also resides inside the small."

If we are to build a new structure of human awareness, we must first modify the grammar of our understanding of reality. Through its many thousands of images that visualise the instability, multiplicity, and potentiality of quantum reality, Grounding suggests that machine-generated representations have the potential to present alternative, and no less valid truths about the material world than those offered up by static photographs or seamless cinematics. A mapping of space, time and language that points outside of all three. Or, as Roach puts it: "A truth that embraces the inherent weirdness of quantum phenomena."

Günseli Yalcinkaya is a writer, researcher and internet folklorist based in London with a particular focus on emerging technologies and online culture. She is a Contributing Editor at Dazed and External Research Affiliate at Moth Quantum. She has appeared in talks and panels at the Architectural Association, BFI, Somerset House, Sónar+D, LAS Art Foundation, Unsound Festival, Vienna Digital Cultures and X Museum.

LDN LAB

LDN LAB Exhibition text here.

Beautiful Collisions

Beth Greenacre

Beautiful Collisions brings together contemporary artists whose work reflects the significant impact of artists from the Caribbean diaspora on British art and culture. The exhibition celebrates how the Caribbean has enriched Britain. While the artists remind us of the historical injustices inflicted on the region and its people, they make space for joy, healing, and radical care.

Housed in Christ Church Spitalfields, Nicholas Hawksmoor's Baroque ecclesiastical masterpiece was built as one of the churches under the New Churches in London and Westminster Act of 1710. This government act was initiated to accommodate a growing population, including thousands of immigrants who arrived in London to settle in suburbs such as Spitalfields during the 17th century. Like the British churches built concurrently and throughout colonial rule in the Caribbean, Christ Church was created in an attempt to Anglicise the local population and quash Dissenters from the governing powers to the day.

The artists in Beautiful Collisions are dissidents from traditionally received knowledge. They honour pluralistic histories and cultures, celebrate displaced bodies and invisible stories, and unite us through shared experiences while elevating the experience of loss. At the same time as acknowledging the enduring traumas of slavery, each artist demonstrates the healing powers of art.

Beautiful Collisions occupies Christ Church, a site of worship which provides a poignant context for the work of Alberta Whittle, Alvaro Barrington, Denzil Forrester, Runkus, Tavares Strachan, and Zinzi Minott. Each artist explores sound, music, ritual, communal cohesion, and freedom of expression, drawing parallels with religions worldwide.

At the centre of Beautiful Collisions are the dynamic paintings of Denzil Forrester, who began capturing the energy and sense of community of East London's reggae and dub nightclub scene in the 1980s and 1990s. Paintings and works on paper from the 90s to the present day set the scene for Beautiful Collisions, in which bodies commune and come together in reverence for reggae and dub artists such as pioneer Jah Shaka and Mad Professor. A brand new painting commissioned for SXSW London depicts a DJ and a mass of indistinguishable, pulsating bodies; called Congregation, the painting is housed during the exhibition in the Nave of Christ Church. The DJ becomes the preacher, the crowd, the assembly, and the message to come together.

To access the heart of the exhibition, we descend into the crypt, where Alvaro Barrington's stained glass windows—used to express important religious messages for centuries—light the way, casting Caribbean sunsets and night skies onto the architecture. Meanwhile, Alberta Whittle's life-size figures, dressed in traditional Caribbean carnival ware and captured in various stages of limbo, weave their way through Forrester's painted dancers.

Born in Barbados, Whittle's bodies draw on characters from across the region, including Jamaica's Pitchy Patchy and Barbados' Shaggy Bear, both of which continue to appear at Carnival. Historically, in Barbados, Carnival was timed with the end of the sugar cane harvest; inevitably linked to oppression, Carnival was more than a mere celebration; it represented liberation and unity. The costumes and masks of Carnival goers were forms of masquerade, and their music and dances were not only moments of kinship and ascension over norms, rules and regulations, but they also represented ideas beyond the reach of the ruling classes. However, with Whittle's performers, the dance, which many regard as a traditional Caribbean dance, freezes moments of physical contortions to highlight how enslaved Africans were forced to perform for the amusement of their owners. The figures take their title, Matrix Moves, from a popular dancehall move and Keanu Reeves' famous film; they, too, are dodging bullets in their masquerade.

Whittle explores the tension between respectability, its norms, and the notion of wildness, such as that of Carnival, its costumes, music, and moves. And at the centre of her enquiry is the possibility of imagining alternative readings of the Caribbean black womxn. In two other works by Whittle, naked womxn are suspended in watery scenes. Water, of course, plays a significant role in the narratives around womxn's bodies, whilst the Atlantic plays a dominant role in the history of colonial extraction of people and resources. In the hands of Whittle, water is a symbol of feminine fluidity and the ability to transgress boundaries. The ocean is an active waterway that, although potent with ancestral memory, is a space that can create connections, offer possibilities to cleanse, and allow alternative realities to be born. Two textile works stretched over painted frames – Beneath the waves, we shapeshift (before I was a shipworm) and Beneath the waves, we shapeshift (before I was a seal) - reference the myth of Drexciya, an Afrofuturist story about an underwater empire created by the unborn children of enslaved African women; womxn's float effortlessly and with ease within the transformative space of the ocean.

Like Whittle, Zinzi Minott explores the place that Black womxn's bodies hold across geographies, space and time and as with Barrington, music has been a continuous part of her practice. Having been raised within sound system culture, Minott frequently draws on repetition, bass, mixing, remixing, vibration and dark space. In her new work premiering in Beautiful Collisions, Minott tells Caribbean stories about movement, migration and The Windrush Generation. This year's iteration of Fi Dem VIII, an annual multimedia project made on the anniversary of the docking of Empire Windrush, is a soundscape that merges with visual sources sampled from archival material, including the artist's personal archives, family videos and recordings. The glitch is a device used across Minott's art practice. In Fi Dem VIII, these distortions, stuttering and abrupt shifts in sound create unique sonic textures and effects that halt us and ask us to review the steady flow of reality. Here it exists as a nod to the dissonance the artist feels as a queer Black womxn whilst also presenting a place where new realities can be realised, and intergenerational pains can be severed.

If in Minott's ruptures, there is space where we can understand how to better "be together", it is in repetition and rhythm that Alvaro Barrington asks us to reflect on the universal and what brings us together. The artist returns to the image of the sun setting over the Caribbean Sea, a subject he has explored over the years. It is an act that encourages contemplative looking. In Beautiful Collisions, the setting sun features in the brand-new stained glass windows and the night sky. Once the sun has set and the stars emerge, we are asked to pause and remind ourselves of the universal rhythms of the day and the passage of time.

Movement is present throughout the exhibition, including the movement of bodies across the Atlantic, in dance halls, and communion. This movement reminds us of the exchange of ideas, identities, and cultures. For Beautiful Collisions, Tavares Strachen has devised a dinner for guests entitled The Last Supper (A Farewell to the Flavours We Might Lose). The performance celebrates the ingredients that we may loose through the continued exploitation of natural resources and environmental degradation that continues as a legacy of colonialism. The artist has carefully devised a meal and will present indigenous Caribbean ingredients in combination to refute stereotypes. The evening will be multi-sensory and include a performance with Jamaican vocalist, producer, and composer Runkus, whose genre-blurring work pushes the boundaries of reggae into bold, future-facing territory and a Gospel Choir.

A constant throughout Beautiful Collisions is a Caribbean Cafe housed at the heart of the exhibition, serving not only as a site to commune, share food and experience the exhibition at a slower pace but also as a place where talks, screenings and tastings will take place. The cafe will house a library of books the artists chose and a collection of vinyl curated by Runkus and Tavares Strachen for guests to listen to. Alvaro Barrington Studio’s musical program Emelda's Junction with Errol and Alex Rita's Touching Bass will curate musical activations throughout the week, which will celebrate soca, calypso, reggae and the wider musical legacy of the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora.