Frieze London has commissioned Athens-based artist Theo Triantafyllidis to create an interactive sculptural installation that doubles as a live multiplayer video game for the fair’s 2026 edition.
The new commission, Feral Metaverse (Spider) (2026), will debut in Frieze London’s Focus section when the fair returns to Regent’s Park from October 14th to 18th. Produced as part of the 2026 Frieze London Artist Award, the work invites visitors to climb, balance, and collaborate inside a large-scale sculptural installation that acts as the entry point to the game’s digital environment. The work is co-commissioned and co-produced with non-profit Forma. This year’s edition of the prize is supported by Google Arts & Culture.
Rather than competing against one another, players must cooperate to navigate the game, forming temporary collective bodies, such as towers, wheels, and spiders. The project expands Triantafyllidis’s ongoing “Feral Metaverse” series, which imagines online spaces built around cooperation, vulnerability, and shared experience rather than competition.
Born in Greece and based in Athens, Triantafyllidis creates games, simulations, installations, and performances that explore the increasingly blurred relationship between physical and virtual worlds. His often darkly humorous works examine themes including ecological collapse, social entanglement, and networked desire through immersive digital environments populated by 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 institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel, and NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, as well as at the Venice Biennale, Sundance New Frontier, and the Athens Biennale.
The Frieze London Artist Award, established in 2014, supports artists in realizing ambitious new commissions at pivotal moments in their careers. Previous recipients include Sophia Al-Maria, Lawrence Lek, Adham Faramawy, Abbas Zahedi, Sung Tieu, Alberta Whittle, and Himali Singh Soin. This year, the award invited artists to experiment with advanced technologies—including artificial intelligence—as collaborative tools in the development of new work.
“It’s a great honor to be given this kind of opportunity, visibility and audience at such a key moment in my practice,” Triantafyllidis said in a statement. “It feels like a supported leap of faith, and a real next step for the work.”
