Sophia Al-Maria’s Frieze Artist Award Is Seriously Funny

In Trickster Makes This World (1998), writer Lewis Hyde argues that many cultural traditions view the trickster figure as the inventor of language. This might be through a multiplication of voices that supplant a single primal tongue or by the creation of forms of ‘inner writing’ that assert self-knowledge in the face of dominant narratives. ‘What tricksters do quite regularly,’ he writes, ‘is create lively talk where there has been silence or where speech has been prohibited.’

Hyde’s insight resonates with the work of 2025 Frieze London Artist Award winner Sophia Al-Maria, whose expansive practice spans filmmaking, writing, sound and more traditional media such as drawing, collage and sculpture. A fascination with ruins, non-linear temporality and speculative histories runs throughout her works, propelled by a sustained inquiry into the elasticity of language. She examines the weight of what can be said, while finding pathways through diverse visual, narrative and performative forms, in order to summon, but not contain, that which evades capture. ‘You can use [words] in all kinds of ways,’ Al-Maria said in an interview in 2021, published in Afterall, ‘to seduce someone, to heal someone, but also to start or end a war.’

The Qatari-American artist first garnered public attention more than a decade ago for her fluid theorization of what she calls ‘Gulf Futurism’. Coined with fellow artist Fatima Al Qadiri, the term grapples with the hyper-charged modernization of the Arabian Gulf region. This compressed period, as Al-Maria puts it, saw ‘one of the most ancient ways of living [come] head-on against extreme wealth and capitalism – glass and steel against wool and camels’.

Al-Maria’s narrative practice, whether in film, performance or on the page, utilizes storytelling that embraces multiplicity rather than a single, linear narrative. This ‘carrier bag’ approach is inspired by sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who, drawing on the paleoanthropological argument that humanity’s first tool is not a weapon, but a bag for moving things from place to place, posits storytelling less as a ‘hunt’ with a beginning, middle and end and more as a ‘meandering sweep’ or ‘gathering'.

This philosophy of elliptical storytelling manifests vividly in Al-Maria’s films. Works like Beast Type Song (2019), Tender Point Ruin (2021) and Tiger Strike Red (2022) blend science fiction, poetic narration, found footage and live performance to probe notions of apocalypse, historiography, trauma, subjectivity and otherness. In Beast Type Song, for instance, multiple narrators, including recordings of Etel Adnan and Derek Jarman, convey a world of political, social and ecological entanglements, suggesting that when words fail, movement, drawing and sound provide new means of expression.

Such preoccupations with language and communication – its excesses, absences, ruptures and overflows – have also been a throughline in Al-Maria’s public and performative projects. An earlier intervention at Frieze Projects in 2014 revealed subliminal messages scattered throughout the fair and incorporated a dystopian sci-fi video addressing climate change and accelerated consumerism, with the monitor pushed around the fair on a trolley by two performers.

In 2020, the Serpentine commissioned Taraxos, a pop-up stage conceived as a platform for visitors to Kensington Gardens to engage in deep listening. Al-Maria’s sculptural installation operated as a conceptual foil to nearby Speakers’ Corner – a historic site for public speeches and debates. Slim metal poles reached towards the sky, crowned by geometric forms recalling sundials, dandelions or asterisks – a punctuation mark that the artist considers a graphic representation of the inexpressible. In keeping with Al-Maria’s sci-fi sensibility, these futuristic totems, moved by the wind, resemble crude communication devices linking park-goers to another dimension.

The artist’s recent work We Slip and Sway Away (2025), a collaboration with the musician Davia Spain commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum for this year’s inaugural AIR festival, is marked by a similar interest in creating space.The sonic piece, described on the museum's website as ‘part séance, part song-cycle, part science-fictional lament’, takes as its point of departure theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker’s Life as No One Knows It (2024), which imagines existence not asa fixed biological category but as an emergent system of signals and structures.

Commissioned as part of the Frieze London Artist Award, Al-Maria’s performance Wall-Based Work (2025) exemplifies the fair’s role in providing early- and mid-career artists with space to experiment with ambitious ideas and, in Al-Maria’s case, make audiences part of the work itself. Adopting the format of a ‘drop down’ stand-up club inside the Frieze London tent, Wall-Based Work deploys comedy to explore subjects from Brexit to ‘art-world lesbian clowning’, from freeports to trauma bonding and ‘white mommy issues’. Although her public talks and writing are often riddled with wit and humour, Al-Maria’s previous works have never explicitly engaged the rituals and frameworks of stand-up comedy. Yet, if we follow Hyde’s notion of the trickster figure as one who multiplies voices or, as Donna Haraway writes in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), as one who turns ‘a stacked deck into a potent set of wild cards for refiguring possible worlds’, then seeds from these earlier works begin to germinate in Al-Maria’s new commission. Humour, after all, not only has the potential to expose raw, unedited emotion, but it offers an inchoate, liberatory space to engage socially repressed or unspeakable topics. ‘A thing is funny,’ George Orwell wrote in his 1945 essay ‘Funny, but Not Vulgar’, ‘when – in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening – it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.’