Project Native Informant

During Frieze Art Fair 2025 week, Sophia Al-Maria will be involved in two major projects.

Winner of the 2025 Frieze London Artist Award, Al-Maria will debut Wall-Based Work, a drop-down comedy club’ that will see the artist perform daily live stand-up sets throughout the duration of Frieze London. The ‘drop-down’ refers to a projected brick-wall backdrop which will descend during her performances. Comedy clubs are notoriously unglamorous in their appointments, but this blank brick wall has other meanings. It is unfinished, lacking a surface or decoration. It suggests a firing squad, alluding to the implied challenge to the comic from their audience to be funny or they will ‘die’ on stage. Above all, it is the antithesis of what you expect at an international art fair. It’s not even an actual wall.

Comedians talk about their ‘material’; Al-Maria’s piece suggests that an artist’s material can have a similarly evanescent quality: it exists, but it has no meaning or reality until it is presented to an audience. The ‘commons’ is that dimension of sharing, but that sharing can be antagonistic, adversarial, even.

‘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.

Al-Maria will also participate in the group
exhibition Paradigm Shift presented by 180 Studios. Opening Wednesday 15 October 2025, Paradigm Shift will transform 180 Strand’s vast subterranean spaces with a landmark exhibition spanning the most acclaimed moving image works from the 1970s to today, drawing on avant-garde cinema, television, music video, performance, fashion, gaming, and internet culture.

Image 1:
Sophia Al-Maria. Photo by Vasso Vu

Image 2:
Sophia Al-Maria
Tiger Strike Red, 2022
Single-channel HD video
23 mins 03 secs
Edition of 3 and 2 AP