Frieze London’s 2026 Artist Award will turn a fair booth into a cooperative game
Frieze London has commissioned Athens-based artist Theo Triantafyllidis to create a new work that sits between sculpture and multiplayer gaming. Titled Feral Metaverse (Spider) (2026), the project will debut in the fair’s Focus section when Frieze London returns to Regent’s Park from October 14th to 18th, 2026.
The commission is part of the 2026 Frieze London Artist Award, co-commissioned and co-produced with the non-profit Forma and supported this year by Google Arts & Culture. At its center is an interactive sculptural installation that serves as the physical threshold to a live digital environment. Visitors will not simply look at the work; they will climb, balance, and collaborate inside it.
Triantafyllidis’s game logic is deliberately collective. Rather than rewarding individual competition, the work asks players to cooperate, forming temporary bodies such as towers, wheels, and spiders in order to navigate the space. That emphasis extends his ongoing “Feral Metaverse” series, which imagines online worlds organized around vulnerability, shared experience, and mutual dependence instead of rivalry.
Born in Greece and based in Athens, Triantafyllidis works across games, simulations, installations, and performances. His practice often uses dark humor to examine ecological collapse, social entanglement, and networked desire, populating immersive digital worlds with humans, animals, monsters, and machines. He holds an MFA in Design Media Arts from UCLA and a diploma in architecture from the National Technical University of Athens.
His work has been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel, NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, the Venice Biennale, Sundance New Frontier, and the Athens Biennale. The Frieze London Artist Award, established in 2014, was created to support ambitious new commissions at key moments in artists’ careers. Previous recipients include Sophia Al-Maria, Lawrence Lek, Adham Faramawy, Abbas Zahedi, Sung Tieu, Alberta Whittle, and Himali Singh Soin.
This year’s edition also asked artists to experiment with advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, as collaborative tools. Triantafyllidis described the commission as “a great honor,” adding that it feels like “a supported leap of faith” and “a real next step for the work.”
