Are You Actually Joking? Sophia Al-Maria Wins the Frieze London Artist Award 2025

London-based artist Sophia Al-Maria has been announced as the recipient of the 2025 Frieze London Artist Award. The award – in partnership with Forma – offers an early- or mid-career artist the opportunity to realise an ambitious new commission at Frieze London.

Al-Maria’s new commission, Wall Based Work (a Trompe LOL), will take the form of a ‘drop-down’ comedy show, performed daily at the fair by the artist inside the Frieze London tent. Responding to this year’s Frieze Artist Award theme – shared across London and Seoul – of ‘future commons’, the work uses the language and rituals of comedy to talk about things that aren’t necessarily funny.

‘It’s the last honest art form,’ says Al-Maria. ‘Stand-up requires presence.’ As AI looms over the notion of individual creativity, the panic-inducing bareness of the comedy-club stage is a last bastion of authenticity. Al-Maria may be performing on her own, but the experience is a collective one, tapping into shared fears of exposure, vulnerability and creative openness.

About Sophia Al-Maria

Sophia Al-Maria lives and labours in London. Her work spans disciplines including drawing, collage, sculpture and film, united by a preoccupation with the power of storytelling and myth and imagining revisionist histories and alternative futures. She has had her work shown at Gwangju Biennale, the New Museum and Whitney Museum in New York, the Venice Biennale, and Tate Britain.

Further Information

Frieze London and Frieze Masters, The Regent’s Park, 15 – 19 October 2025.   

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_{Main image: Sophia Al-Maria, TIGER STRIKE RED, 2022, installation view. Courtesy: the artist, Project Native Informant, London, and Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; photograph: Jueqian Fang}