A climbable spider game and a new section devoted to mass culture turn Frieze London 2026 into a test of whether the images we scroll past every day can carry the weight of serious art.
Image: RAWdz Ivan, Selma Selman's "Vale" at Art Basel 2025 Parcours, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0. Original source.
Introduction
Frieze London opens in The Regent's Park on 14 October 2026 and runs until 18 October, alongside Frieze Masters, according to the fair's own Ultimate Guide to Frieze London 2026. The same guide counts 172 galleries from 42 countries and regions. Two items on this year's floor plan stood out to us: a newly curated section called The Code Universe, and the Frieze Artist Award commission, a giant spider that visitors climb onto in order to play a multiplayer game.
The Code Universe is a new section of Frieze London, curated by Carol Yinghua Lu, that gathers artists who use mass culture (consumer goods, media imagery and the flow of information) as their way of responding to social change. It matters because a major international art fair has given popular culture its own curated room, which asks visitors to look at the ordinary images around them with the attention usually reserved for painting.
What follows is our commentary on that decision. We have not walked the fair; every factual detail below comes from Frieze's published materials and the reporting linked in each section.
What Exactly Is The Code Universe?
Frieze's first announcement of the 2026 fairs says the section "will examine how artists respond to societal transformation through the prism of mass culture." The release describes its curator as Director of the Inside-Out Art Museum in Beijing. Her Wikipedia biography adds that she was Co-Artistic Director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale in 2012 and is a contributing editor at frieze magazine.
The fair guide lists eight artists shown by nine galleries, including Selma Selman with acb Gallery, Carolyn Lazard with Trautwein Herleth, Nikita Kadan with Voloshyn Gallery, Payne Zhu with Spurs Gallery and Shinro Ohtake, presented jointly by greengrassi and Take Ninagawa. In the guide's words, the section explores "how popular culture is created, circulated and consumed."
That last phrase is the one we keep returning to. Creation, circulation and consumption describe a supply chain. The section seems most interested in the route an image travels from factory or studio to screen, shelf and memory.
Why Would an Art Fair Build a Room Around Mass Culture?
Shinro Ohtake is a useful way into the question. According to his Wikipedia entry, he was born in 1955, paints, makes installations and designs record covers and book covers. He showed collaged, sculptural artist books in the Encyclopedic Palace at the 2013 Venice Biennale, and he designed Naoshima Bath "I♥湯," a public bathhouse and art facility on the Japanese island of Naoshima.
A record sleeve, a book cover, a neighborhood bath: each is a place where people meet images without ever deciding to visit an art space. Our reading is that The Code Universe treats those encounters as the real gallery and the fair booth as a place to slow them down. We find that persuasive. We suspect much of the visual vocabulary people carry around was formed by packaging, film, games and signage long before any museum visit.
There is also a quieter argument here about who gets to define seriousness. When a fair gives mass culture a curator, a dedicated section and a place in its official guide, it is conceding that the boundary between "high" and "popular" is a decision made by institutions, and that decisions can be revisited. We explored a similar shift in our piece on the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art; Frieze is making a related move inside a commercial setting, where the stakes involve what gets bought as well as what gets shown.
What Does a Climbable Spider Have to Do With Pop Culture?
Quite a lot, if games count as popular culture, and we think they plainly do. The 2026 Frieze Artist Award went to Athens-based artist Theo Triantafyllidis for Feral Metaverse (Spider), installed at stand P1. A profile by Kadish Morris in frieze describes a large, six-legged spider that visitors physically climb. Each player is assigned an avatar and joins a game in which the spider acts as the antagonist, repeatedly knocking down the human ladder the group is trying to build. Frieze creative producer Sherie Sitauze, who played it, called the experience "both exciting and frustrating."
The same profile frames the work as a social experiment about how people behave in shared digital spaces, including cooperation, vulnerability and the darker sides of online environments. It also notes that an earlier version appeared in the 2023 exhibition Group Hug in New York as an eight-player gaming rig.
Bodies inside a game
What interests us most is the inversion. Online games usually let us cooperate and fail without touching anyone. Here, several strangers have to climb onto the same soft structure, in close physical contact, while the on-screen game shows the spider undoing their progress. The friction of the internet is moved back into the body, where it becomes visible to everyone watching from the aisle.
Where AI enters the picture
The award was co-commissioned with Forma, in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture, and this year's brief asked artists to explore advanced technologies, including AI, as a tool and collaborator. Google's own account of the commission says the team used Gemini to generate sketches, character designs, backdrops and 3D renders, and that the award let Triantafyllidis expand his team to include sculptors, fabricators, textile designers, game developers and civil engineers. Speaking about AI as a material, the artist told frieze: "I'm trying to understand what the material wants to do." The finished object is still a hand-built, soft-surfaced creature that people have to haul themselves onto, which suggests that the software shaped the world of the game while the physical spider kept the human effort at its center.
Where Do Prints and Editions Fit Into a Fair Thinking About Mass Culture?
Right next door, conceptually. Frieze's announcement says that Editions, now in its fifth year, brings together publishers and print studios including Borch Editions, Knust Kunz Gallery Editions, Paragon, Cristea Roberts Gallery and STPI, showing prints, editioned works and multiples. The release presents the section as an accessible entry point for new collectors.
The fair guide adds Allied Editions, which offers artists' editions supporting seven London not-for-profit organisations: Camden Art Centre, Chisenhale Gallery, ICA, South London Gallery, Serpentine Galleries, Studio Voltaire and Whitechapel Gallery. Artists named in the guide's Editions coverage include Julie Mehretu, Do Ho Suh and Ryan Gander.
We think the pairing is telling. An edition is reproduction with a deliberate limit: the same technology that powers mass culture, applied with restraint and care. Placing editions and The Code Universe in the same tent puts two answers to one question side by side. One section studies how images multiply without limit; the other shows what happens when someone chooses where multiplication stops. As a studio that publishes its own work as fine art prints, we recognize that tension from the inside.
What Should We Take Home From This Year's Fair?
These suggestions are ours alone. Start by noticing where the strongest images in your home actually came from. For many of us, a film still, a game world, a record sleeve or a city sign shaped our taste more than any painting did. Our own visual language at Soulkeeper.2099, which we describe as cyberpunk realism, neon surrealism and gothic-tech, borrows openly from that same reservoir of science fiction, nightlife and screen glow.
Then try a simple experiment: hang one image whose vocabulary comes from popular culture next to one that comes from older art history, and live with the pair for a few weeks. Notice which one you look at in the evening, and which one you explain to guests. That small domestic test mirrors, in miniature, the conversation Frieze has staged in Regent's Park.
Conclusion
Frieze London 2026 has given popular culture its own curated section and handed its headline commission to a multiplayer game you climb with your whole body. Read together, those choices suggest that the art world is taking the circulation of images (on screens, sleeves, packaging and game servers) as seriously as the images themselves. The fair runs until 18 October. Before you next scroll past an advert or a game trailer, which image in your home first reached you through a screen, a sleeve or a shop window rather than a gallery?
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Code Universe at Frieze London 2026?
The Code Universe is a new curated section at Frieze London 2026 that presents artists who respond to social change through mass culture. It is curated by Carol Yinghua Lu, and the fair guide lists eight artists shown by nine galleries, including Shinro Ohtake, Selma Selman and Nikita Kadan.
What is Feral Metaverse (Spider) by Theo Triantafyllidis?
Feral Metaverse (Spider) is a climbable, six-legged spider sculpture that doubles as a live multiplayer game, and it won the 2026 Frieze Artist Award. Visitors climb onto its legs, receive avatars and try to build a human ladder while the spider, acting as the game's antagonist, knocks it down. It was co-commissioned with Forma in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture.
When and where is Frieze London 2026?
Frieze London 2026 takes place in The Regent's Park, London, from 14 to 18 October 2026, on the same dates as Frieze Masters. According to Frieze's announcement, Wednesday 14 October is by invitation only, and general admission begins on the afternoon of Thursday 15 October.
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