This year’s Frieze Artist Award winner discusses night-walking, Shakespeare, time travel, and her commission for Frieze, Wall Based Work (a Trompe LOL) — a daily stand-up comic performance.
Billy Parker: Tell me about Wall Based Work (a Trompe LOL).
Sophia Al Maria: It’s coming out of frustration.
BP: You’re building a comedy club within the tent and performing stand-up every day?
SM: Yes. My comedy instructor, Dec Monroe of the Angel Comedy Club—
BP: We’re going to circle back to the comedy instructor later…
SM: Can you imagine there’s such a thing? He said, “Never perform stand-up before 5 p.m.” but the fair shuts at 6 p.m., so we’re doing something ill-advised: performing at 4:30 every day. People will probably be sober, and in the hideous fluorescent lighting of an art fair! I did a stand-up course years ago because it frightened me the most, other than stripping.
BP: Stand-up is scarier than stripping.
SM: But it’s a writer’s performance medium?
BP: Notoriously the most difficult.
SM: Notoriety is warranted. We’ve rented a brick wall backdrop to lower into the space. I posted a photo and several people responded with “Is that a Reena Spaulings?” I had no idea who that was but it’s in the MoMA collection. It looks the same.
BP: That’s quite funny already.
SM: Exactly. “This is Reena Spaulings and I’m selling it.”
BP: You’re a trained stand-up comedian?
SM: I did another course last June for experienced comics, geared towards preparing for [Edinburgh] Fringe. The cantankerous attitude I had in December has… I’ve been humbled. I’m just out here trying to survive. For years my galleries have asked, “Could you maybe do some wall-based work?” This is my best shot. Not very sellable.
BP: What brought you to comedy?
SM: Depression. Abject despair. Climate grief. A fullon genocide and impending World War III. Despicable misogyny, transphobia, xenophobia and everything that’s rising. I can’t be out here making little films nobody sees. This is committing career suicide in the middle of an art fair.
BP: There’s the comedy!
SM: I have a drawing of Daffy Duck up in the studio. Did you watch Looney Tunes? There’s this gag: a fox goes into Porky Pig’s casting office and keeps trying to show his act. Eventually, the fox takes a horn of gunpowder, some bubbling liquid, drinks, jumps up and down, lights a match, swallows it, and blows up. As the ghost floats up to heaven, there’s nothing but an explosion mark on the floor. The fox says, “It’s a great act, but I can only do it once”. That really stuck with me. I always thought I was Coyote, born a loser kind of vibe. It turns out I’m more of a Daffy these days.
BP: Obsessed.
SM: I’m not jealous of anybody, but I am disgruntled. I learned the difference between envy and jealousy recently. Envy is wanting something someone else has, jealousy is having something you are guarding from others. You might give someone the evil eye if you’re envious. Jealousy is closer to being a miser.
BP: Well, I think I’m both then. And disgruntled.
SM: Wow. I caved and watched a Steve Martin Masterclass. I had a weird terror of him as a child. I think it was his white hair. He said, “When you’re developing your comedic persona, ask close friends what your worst trait is.”
BP: Making this work has been discovering your worst personal traits?
SM: At least it’s a starting point. The delivery device.
BP: The shell.
SM: That was an interesting exercise. I know who my true friends are now.
BP: What was discovered?
SM: Hypocrites. My old gallerist said I don’t know when to stop. What else? I get really obsessed with a subject and rant about it.
BP: I do that too.
SM: You’re a good listener?
BP: And a good ranter.
SM: That’s rare. We can have a rant-off. What’s bothering you right now?
BP: The world seems atrocious. It’s hard to engage because everything feels so unreal and I’m in this art-literary London bubble, which feels futile.
SM: We can sit in silence because we feel the same. We ought to get more difficult, so difficult that the government has to do something. Milk toast, mealy-mouthed motherfuckers. What the fuck am I doing? I’m painting pictures? For who? For what? The art-film-literary worlds are tied up with the interests of money. That’s what I miss about writing books. You have freedom. That’s why they come for books first, they know they have secrets.
BP: You’re not writing books right now?
SM: No, but that’s the hope — that this career suicide will allow me to stop and write my damn novel.
BP: How do you negotiate narrative?
SM: We have a lot to learn from Scheherazade — the ultimate commercial break. Taking screenwriting as my main source of income means I tend to go off-piste when I make art films. More a ramble or rant. There’s ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ by Ursula K. Le Guin. We’ve been brainwashed to think the Hollywood sense of ‘you’ve got to save the cat’. You have to engage an audience, which means you’ll make money. It’s an industrial trap for the story. The news media require increasingly shocking events to take place. There’s a novel by J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition. He’s my favourite Englishman, other than Shakespeare. And maybe you.
BP: I love Shakespeare too.
SM: He is a real through-line. Shakespeare made up so many good words. Right now, I’m struggling with the word ‘based’. That’s my big question mark because it’s in the title of this work. As an elderly millennial, I keep on using it wrong. I thought the internet parlance of ‘that’s so based’ meant ‘offensive’ but it comes from freebasing code and means someone is unapologetically themselves. I first saw it in the comments of a fucked-up war crime video. I feel it’s been taken up by the red-pilled guys.
BP: Rewriting language is interesting.
SM: I made a work for the Hayward last year. A big billboard underneath Waterloo Bridge, and was next to the Globe Theatre, so I wanted something Shakespeare-related. One night I was walking and saw a big bright thing. It was my poster. I had this image of a D.O.P. with her eyes shut behind the camera. I wrote a sonnet because I was thinking about the phrase from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Look not with the eyes, but with the heart.” When I finally went down there, there was a really sweet security guard who I ended up chatting with for an hour. It was 2 a.m. and I was way too drunk. He said, “I wake up in the morning, look at all this grey bullshit, and then I see this. It makes my day better. It’s like sunshine, because in London there is none.” I love a night-walk — it’s the best thing for writing.
BP: I started writing through walking.
SM: A homeless lady who was bleeding down her leg came up to me near Hatton Gardens. She asked if I was looking for a job and told me that she sometimes waits tables at an illegal casino that moves around different car parks in East London. I was really tempted to give her my number…
BP: I’ve spent a lot of time in Soho in my life. There’s Soho, and then this under-layer, a completely different part of the city. Sometimes you flash into the other layer—
SM: It’s time travel. The French House is a portal.
BP: It’s my global local. I lived in Bank during lockdown, when the city was completely empty and the alleyways felt like Venice, like you could be in the sixteenth century. I walked up and down the Thames every night and journeyed through a weird series of events: an illegal salsa class, someone dancing on top of a convertible, someone singing opera. I once exchanged a Rizla for a performance.
SM: Skill exchange!
BP: Always around 2 a.m.
SM: That’s the magic hour. Another time, I walked back through the Barbican tunnel and one of my favourite songs, Five Years by David Bowie, echoed everywhere. A guy was driving real slow, idling, blasting it, singing at the top of his lungs. I stopped and sang it back to him. That’s the thing about art — it’s worthwhile for moments like the security guard. I wouldn’t have enjoyed it if I’d gone to the opening.
BP: Putting colour on the brutalist river. Art at its most simple.
SM: COVID got me into colour, watercolouring, and dressing. I never used to wear or even think about colour.
BP: It took me ages to learn how to use it properly. I remember going to the Sennelier shop in Paris and going through all the paints. I chose one and later went through my camera roll, and every fifth image had the same green. I like colour in that weird way. I’m not a colour theorist.
SM: I spent most of my adult life wearing all black because it was easy to wear under abayas. I had an OCD thing of not wanting to see a different colour under black. I would watch this old man across the street. I called him Red because he had a bright red windbreaker and a big wooden cane. I recently met him for the first time outside of the Tina Turner Theatre. He always carries a bright blue plastic bag.
BP: Was it accidental?
SM: It turns out he was a jazz musician. My ex sometimes sent me flowers, but I’d be pissed at her, so I would take the flowers and leave them by his doorstep. He inspired me to wear colour, and that tremendously changed my experience of being in the world.
BP: Do you bring that into your work?
SM: Yes, especially with grading video. For my film The Magical State, I described what I wanted to the colourist as if a candy factory had been irradiated by a nuclear disaster. It’s the most deranged, toxic colour grade I’ve ever done. You’ve got to be careful what you write because it becomes true. Octavia Butler did it. We’re in her reality. When we collectively start to hallucinate something, it’s hard to get out of it. I always loved dystopias when I was young. We’re in Orwell, we’re in Butler, we’re in fucking Anthony Burgess hell.
BP: I didn’t have the dystopia obsession, but I do have a vivid memory of the hoverboard from Back to the Future being made in reality. There was also an early noughties film, in which the protagonist had a laptop that folded back to become a tablet. I couldn’t wait for that to exist.
SM: Flash forward a year later.
BP: Do you have a favourite science-fiction work?
SM: Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy. In the wake of a nuclear war, alien gene traders from the universe come to Earth and start breeding with humans. It’s about eugenics, but from a wild perspective. I like Stalker by Tarkovsky, but that’s an arsehole choice.
BP: I’ve been saving Tarkovsky.
SM: For a rainy day? That’ll be dark.
BP: I like dark. I like to hoard things from the past in case I run out of things in the future. You grew up in America and spent a lot of time in the Gulf. What brought you to London?
SM: You want the true story? I fell in love with an Englishman who sent me to Norwich to work on a film production. I felt so comfortable here. I was nineteen. He turned out to be a spy. It’s a long story, but the real, underlying truth of why I felt comfortable here was the soft power of British children’s literature. I also grew up watching Red Dwarf, Blackadder, and Sherlock Holmes, so it felt a bit like home when I first arrived. Anglophilia brought me, as well as music — I was a young person in the nineties during Cool Britannia, which was a state-sanctioned export. Blair wanted to make Britain cool again.
BP: Like abstract expressionism.
SM: Exactly, but not the CIA. Just straight up Westminster, capitalism, and the Spice Girls.
