Meadow at the British Art Fair 2025

We were delighted to be invited back to the British Art Fair, to again create the Fifth Plinth exhibition space at Saatchi Gallery. This year saw an expanded Meadow presence, with a larger space hosting 17 artists whose works ranged from personal stories about Indian mango groves to contemplative Buddhist-inspired temples, including several physical artworks extended through augmented reality.

The Fifth Plinth concept remains simple: a single white plinth in an otherwise empty room becomes the foundation for an ever-changing exhibition of virtual artworks. By eliminating physical constraints, emerging artists can exhibit at a prestigious venue like this without the usual logistical and financial barriers, while exploring scale and time in ways impossible with traditional materials.

It was particularly rewarding to see several artists return from last year's exhibition with a deeper and more ambitious grasp of how these technologies can reshape the art world. The progression in their work speaks to a maturing relationship between contemporary artists and spatial computing.

Highlights

Gordon Hack — Ancestral Load Balancer (†ENSHROUDED)

A shrouded painting that reveals itself only through augmented reality. Hack's choice to physically cover the work makes a pointed statement about the contemporary image economy:

Image value is being eroded by network forces and artificial intelligence. That's why I've opted to cover up this painting and instead make it viewable only in augmented reality. Viewing it in this way allows you to experience it in a way that is more true to the form of the networked image itself.

The piece exemplifies how AR can extend physical artworks rather than simply replacing them—the shroud is not a barrier but part of the work's meaning.

Interviews with Gordon Hack and Artemis Weng about their artworks.

Artemis Weng — Celestial Pavilion

An immersive experience that transforms any space into a sanctuary for contemplation. In the relentless flow of contemporary life, we are increasingly in need of peace and reassurance; Weng suggests this tranquillity might be found wherever you stand.

The Meadow team was particularly struck by the level of visual sophistication Weng achieved, utilising every technique in the game development playbook to create an experience that far surpasses what is typically expected from mobile AR.

Maren Dagny Juell — Empathy Objects

Based on artefacts from Juell's upcoming film Community Guidelines, which imagines a dystopian future shaped by social media's content moderation policies. In the film, a former content moderator—tasked with censoring violent and disturbing imagery—appears on a talk show and reveals how abstract objects from her dreams have begun to manifest in reality.

The work will be exhibited alongside the film in Oslo this spring. We're pleased to see Juell continue working with Meadow following Merkestein og Magi, her site-specific public AR artwork installed in Skårerparken, Oslo last year.

Empathy Objects, by Maren Dagny Juell.

Narrative works

Something that stayed with us was the quality of narrative pieces in this year's selection. Shruti Nagaraj's Maavu, created from field recordings and 3D scans of a mango grove in her hometown Bengaluru, maps a multilingual cycle of growth, consumption and decay as the virtual mangoes undergo an ASCII-style transformation across Kannada and English symbols—a deeply personal meditation on place and memory. Anushka Khemka and Selin Öztürk's Ancestor's Cinema takes viewers on a journey through the image worlds of early humans, imagining that the cave paintings they left behind reflected not only their waking lives but also their dreams, flickering across the theatre of their minds.

Interviews with Shruti Nagaraj, Anushka Khemka and Selin Ozturk about their artworks.

Our grateful thanks to Rebekah Tolley Georgiou, curator for the Digitalism section, who assembled a remarkable group of artists really pushing the boundaries of digital art. It was a joy to find ourselves back among the best of the British digital art scene, and we look forward to seeing what these artists bring next year.

Finally, thank you to everyone who came to experience and interact with the works—the Meadow space was often full, strengthening our belief in the role of XR within contemporary art.

Exhibiting Artists

Aarti Bhalekar Jake Buckley Bethan Hancock Gordon Hack Maren Dagny Juell Anushka Khemka Jaein Lee Chanwoo Lee Riya Mahajan Shruti Nagaraj Selin Öztürk Ashima Pargal Natália Stojková Muhil Venkatesh Artemis Weng Meara Withe Lily Zhang