DUBAI.- The Third Line announced that 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 realize 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.

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.

Al-Maria is a Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker whose multidisciplinary practice spans film, fiction, and cultural criticism. Raised between the Pacific Northwest and the Gulf, her work draws on pop culture, Arabic poetry, sci-fi, and personal experiences of climate change and technological isolation. Through narrative-rich works told from unexpected perspectives, she crafts haunting visions of a world on the edge, blending critique with captivating storytelling.