South by Southwest London aims to deliver ‘sensible optimism’ at a time of global uncertainty – The Art Newspaper

South by Southwest London (SXSW London)—the first European iteration of the high-profile South by Southwest film, media and music festival founded in Austin, Texas, 38 years ago—should encourage “a sensible optimism” at a time of global uncertainty, according to its chief executive, Max Alexander.

The week-long festival, which will run in Shoreditch, east London, in early June, will add strong visual arts and fashion elements to the established Austin recipe of trend-setting tech, cinema and music. And, as Alexander, the ebullient operational rainmaker who formerly ran Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Company and the ultra-creative events company Secret Cinema, tells The Art Newspaper, it should help visitors understand that “there are good, clever people with open minds everywhere”.

“Those good, clever people, individually, severally, collectively, with the tools that technology and art offer,” Alexander says, “can address or ameliorate some of the problems that seem sometimes to be so overwhelming that [people] retreat to a very private space.”

“Beautiful Collisions”

SXSW London, whose main theme is “Beautiful Collisions”—one designed to highlight the cross-disciplinary nature of contemporary art and performance—this week announced a raft of the lead performers and speakers who will feature in 420-plus events across 29 venues, including three main conference centres.

The festival will host the first UK retrospective of the Nigerian-British artist and film director Jenn Nkiru—whose video Black to Techno was featured at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and who won the 2020 Grammy award for best music video, with Beyoncé, for the megastar singer’s Brown Skin Girl.

Another Grammy winner, the producer and performer Wyclef Jean—the former Fugees front man who played a famous set at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (Pamm) during Art Basel Miami Beach in 2015, during which he carried the evening’s honoree the collector and philanthropist Jorgé Perez on his shoulders—will discuss his charitable work and the use of new technology in composing music. More headline film and visual art participants will be announced int the coming weeks.

Meanwhile editors from The Art Newspaper will be moderating conference sessions at SXSW London on breakout new art galleries in London; on process in contemporary art, especially AI art and NFTs; and on London’s cultural movers and shakers in 2025.

For Alexander, Nkiru’s retrospective—which will include the London premiere of her latest work The Great North—will epitomise the festival’s ambition to highlight multimodal work and to act as a “love letter to London”. “We like to think of ourselves as having a global ambition and permission to talk to artists and hear from artists of global repute, but also an artist who so avowedly sits across different disciplines and comfortable with different modes of expressing her art,” the chief executive says.

At Miami in 2015, Wyclef Jean told The Art Newspaper that “the way I paint my music” is a bit like the way the late Jean-Michel Basquiat painted his canvases. Basquiat’s father came from the musician’s hometown of Croix-des-Bouquets, just outside Port-au-Prince, in Haiti. The late artist’s style of “leaving the painting up to the audience to figure out what it is, that’s how I perform”, Jean said in 2015, “in an eclectic fashion”. For Alexander, an avowed admirer of Jean’s music, “he’s moved on and developed and he’s just as important for his charitable work now, particularly now when Haiti is going through such a difficult, tumultuous time … as an advocate and an ambassador for a much embattled small nation.”

The other conference headliners announced to date include the actor, filmmaker, philanthropist, and musician Idris Elba; the artist and electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre; the lockdown sensation fitness coach Joe Wicks; the comedian Katherine Ryan; the author and alternative medicine champion Deepak Chopra; and Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief executive of Colossal Biosciences.

Alexander, who has a background in science, is excited to hear from Ben Lamm, who plans with Colossal Biosciences to bring back extinct species as well as to preserve those in danger of extinction, epitomising the SXSW brand’s ambition to present cutting-edge science and design. Lamm recently confirmed to the Guardian that his company aims to bring a woolly mammoth calf into the world by 2028.

Alexander is intrigued by Lamm’s “extraordinary ambition”, how the entrepreneur is taking what “feels like the purest of pure sciences”, to anticipate the problem of species extinction, and “placing himself in a position where he might be able to solve this global conundrum in three, five, seven, or 10 years time before we’ve even as a species or as people acknowledge that it’s there. He is for me, the collision between a much storied narrative arc and the possibilities of bleeding edge science.”

A love letter to London

Alexander tells The Art Newspaper that he has been brought in as chief executive to add his production experience, developed with Really Useful and Secret Cinema, to the abundant creative talent already in the team. This creative talent already includes Patrick Moore, a board member of SXSW London and former executive director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh; Randel Bryan, managing director of the festival; Beth Greenacre, visual arts adviser; Adem Holness, head of music; Anna Bogutskaya, head of screen; and Katy Arnander, director of programming.

Alexander is from Inverness in the Scottish highlands. “I’m a chroiteir, which is I’m a crofter’s son,” he says. “But I’ve lived in London permanently since 1991 with a two-year gap in San Francisco…I’m an absolute passionate advocate of London as this extraordinary mixture of global presence and ambition, but in hyperlocal values as well.”

“I’m passionate about London for its complexity, but also for its refusal to be bound by its London-ness as well,” he says. “It’s always been very outward looking.” South by Southwest, he says, “refuses to allow itself to be pinned down“ and remains “discreetly purposeful. I think that London’s the same. It refuses to be for anything. It’s just joyfully itself.“

The festival, he says, “is emphatically for Londoners. It’s democratic, it’s accessible. It’s so wide-ranging that you would have to be dull of soul, not to find something incredibly exciting at the heart of it that will change your life in a little way. And whether you come out with your sleeves rolled up and ready to change the world, make it a better place, or that you’ve learned to do a card trick, or you’ve had to made some friends, it’s going to be really valuable; an uplifting experience.“

• SXSW London, 2-7 June 2025, Shoreditch, east London