Athens-based artist Theo Triantafyllidis has been named the recipient of the 2026 Frieze London Artist Award, where he will present an ambitious participatory installation that transforms visitors from spectators into players.
The award, now in its eleventh year, is being supported for the first time by Google Arts & Culture and is co-commissioned and co-produced with Forma. Triantafyllidis’ new work, Feral Metaverse (Spider), will be unveiled at Frieze London, which takes place in Regent’s Park from 14th–18th October 2026.
Part climbable sculpture, part live multiplayer game, Feral Metaverse (Spider) extends Triantafyllidis’ ongoing exploration of shared digital worlds into physical space. Rather than treating technology as something isolated behind a screen, the work asks visitors to climb, balance, cooperate and physically interact with one another to navigate a collective game environment.
The installation imagines what digital spaces might become if they were built around cooperation, vulnerability and care rather than competition.
At the centre of the work is a large spider-like sculpture that initially appears imposing but reveals itself to be soft, tactile and inviting. Climbing onto the sculpture allows participants to enter a shared multiplayer experience where they must work together to create temporary collective bodies — towers, wheels, embraces and spiders — blurring the boundaries between sculpture, performance, gaming and social experiment.
This year’s award also marks a shift in the programme’s remit by inviting artists to experiment with advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, as collaborative creative tools rather than simply subjects of investigation.
Eva Langret, Director of EMEA at Frieze, said:
“The Frieze London Artist Award has always supported artists at a pivotal moment in their career to realise work at a scale and ambition that might otherwise be out of reach. With Feral Metaverse (Spider), Triantafyllidis has created something that demands physical presence. You have to be there, in the room, climbing it, playing it, figuring it out with strangers.”
Triantafyllidis described the commission as “a supported leap of faith” and an opportunity to push both the sculptural and gaming aspects of the project further than ever before with his Athens-based team.
Working across games, simulations, performance and installation, Triantafyllidis has developed an international reputation for creating immersive environments where natural and artificial intelligences coexist. His works often explore ecological collapse, networked desire and social interaction through the language of play, while placing the human body at the centre of increasingly technological systems.
Previous recipients of the Frieze London Artist Award include Sophia Al-Maria, Lawrence Lek, Adham Faramawy, Abbas Zahedi, Sung Tieu, Alberta Whittle and Himali Singh Soin, with many going on to major international exhibitions and institutional commissions.
Presented within Frieze London’s Focus section, Feral Metaverse (Spider) continues the award’s commitment to supporting ambitious new commissions while reflecting the increasingly fluid relationship between contemporary art, digital culture and embodied experience.
About the artist
Theo Triantafyllidis builds performative systems where natural and synthetic intelligences coexist. Working with games, live simulations, performances and installations, he creates volatile arrangements presented as darkly playful worlds — using the logic of play and simulation to approach phenomena too vast to narrate: ecological collapse, social entanglement and networked desire. At the centre of his practice is the body: primal, sexual, comedic and often overwhelmed, caught between ancient instincts and the accelerating systems we inhabit. His characters — human, animal, monster or machine — teeter between control and surrender, humour and dread, intimacy and spectacle, searching for a tender, hormonal core in an overstimulated world. Triantafyllidis holds an MFA from UCLA, Design Media Arts, and a Diploma of Architecture from the National Technical University of Athens, and has shown work at the Whitney Museum, Centre Pompidou, House of Electronic Arts and NRW Forum, among others, as well as the 2017 Venice Biennale, Sundance New Frontier 2020 and Athens Biennale 2021.
