The Doughnut(W)Hole

Is the hole in the doughnut part of the doughnut? A bemusing question. At least at first. Because the longer you think about it, the more complex it becomes. Is the answer to be found in the philosophical, psychological, scientific, or mechanical? The humble doughnut, reinterpreted as an Aristotelian snack. Being in relationship with non-being? Doughnut as gooey event horizon, a quantum muse? Perhaps it’s the embodiment of Leonard Cohen’s cracks — the cracks where the light gets in? Does our approach to the question reveal anything about how we regard holes — as simple ‘lack, or as something altogether different, something essential for the whole? Do wholes need holes?

When The Wrong Biennale announced that the 7th edition was to ‘embrace a world transformed by AI’, the first order of business was to survey the breadth of work artists are making with, and about, AI. What immediately stood out was the propensity for using AI to fill in gaps and to mend tears — reconstructing family histories, regenerating memories, replacing lost objects (with ‘found’ non-objects), and even raising the dead. Undoubtedly, for many artists, lack is a powerful presence, and in cahoots with AI, these artists are deftly and convincingly navigating and negotiating absence.

For other artists, however, holes are primordial, like Chaos in Greek mythology — an abyssal fissure from which everything is possible. This generative space is to be mined for the ethereal: patterns and rhythms, the wave that ever so briefly coalesces into something solid. And poof, it’s gone. The whole and the hole are one and the same.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard (1964) writes, ‘For the great dreamers of corners and holes, nothing is ever empty. The dialectics of full and empty only correspond to two geometrical non-realities.’ And this brings us (ahem...) full circle, back to the question posed by the doughnut: Is the hole in the doughnut part of the doughnut?

From an open call for artists whose work explores holes and wholes in the age of AI, fourteen international artists have been selected to exhibit in this pavilion. In their work, these artists endeavour to fill holes, simulate holes, or deep-dive into them — all while considering the question raised at the very beginning.

Welcome to The Doughnut(W)Hole!

Kim Shaw, curator, 2025
How to navigate the site...
If you're comfortable finding your way around websites, ignore this page – scroll to the (w)hole below and start exploring. If you'd like some guidance, here's how the site works:

The Pavilion is organised into three curatorial parlours – Pot(W)Holes, Memory(W)Holes, and Worm(W)Holes. Each is presented below in its own sticky-jammy colour scheme, where you can click on thumbnails to visit the artists’ work. There are also embedded links to the artworks in the descriptions. Alternatively, you can browse by artist name using the doughnut menu in the bottom right-hand corner. Perhaps, together, these form two outer circles around a central (w)hole – a space where the works reside as HTML, waiting for your interaction to bring their dynamic relations into temporary view. Some pages scroll, others don’t. If you get lost, click on the doughnut. 

The work is visual or audiovisual and best viewed on a larger screen rather than a mobile phone. Some works have sound that plays immediately.
Pot(W)Holes

Even in its nascent stages, AI arrived on the scene as a disruptive force. In the art world, an existential anxiety – sure to surpass that caused by the arrival of the camera and the urinal – is lurking. But those artists who have embraced AI are forging ahead, hurtling at speed down a pothole-laden B-road, navigating often bruising but thoroughly thrilling encounters with this (disruptive) force. What a ride!


 In 1993, Jeff Wall spent over a year orchestrating actors and combining 50 photographs for A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai). Today, AI generates similar compositions in seconds. My series After Wall transforms these balanced human arrangements into fungal-like tableaux, exploring shifting concepts of authorship and artistic value in the AI era.

Ben Millar Cole, 2024/25, photography



Exploring the paradox of wholeness feels wrong, this work visualises the absence of absence—a doughnut that fails to form its hole. The piece manipulates light and shadow to erase depth, creating a seamless yet uneasy fullness.

Merve Kurtuluş, 2025, moving image (single-channel video looped)



To Pigeon-Fill the Sky is a photographic storybook about artificial intelligence, the creative process, and, of course, pigeons. The project exists both as a photobook—shot and edited in the summer of 2024—and as a website, expanded, distorted, and hacked together in 2025.

Duncan Petrie, 2024/25, photobook and website



Welcome to the Past is inspired by the Y2K bug and the anxiety of technological collapse. By reimagining low-resolution aesthetics in yarn, the project highlights the value of slowness, touch, and human presence in an age of AI and hyper-digital life.

Min Jung Tsai, 2025, wool and performance

Memory(W)Holes

Memory has almost unequalled value to humans because it maintains the story of
who we are and, in some sense, defines us. Memory holes are acutely felt. But can
synthetic memories approximate the non-linear, networked fragments that define
human memory? Or are they simply elaborate fictions?


The Memory of Deep Blue provides a photographic record of the landmark 1997 victory of IBM’s Deep Blue over chess champion Garry Kasparov. Each photogram retraces a move by the computer (white) as it defeats Kasparov, marking a key moment in AI history.

Alan Knox, 2025, photography



I haunt myself is a poetic exploration of how digital technology shapes personal memory. Combining self-shot and archival footage with a conversation between the artist and an AI doppelganger, the work asks whether forgetting is essential to remembering and questions the line between archiving and experiencing.

David Koh, 2025, moving image (single-channel video), 4:16 mins



All that is solid… explores what remains when we fade from memory. Through found and AI-generated images, Deane inhabits spaces between presence and absence, asking what makes us search through the voids others leave behind.

Sarah Deane, 2025, image and audio, 4:48 mins



I Want to be Defined by a Grapefruit explores Reece’s struggle with obsessive thoughts through an exchange with her AI-generated great uncle, Eddy. Sent to Barcelona for relief, she instead finds therapy in photography, transforming her fear of medication into a metaphor. Perhaps photography was the bittersweet fruit she required.

Heidi Reece, 2025, photography and audio



Can you make new photographs of someone who is dead? Can you talk to them? In this series of photographs and conversations, Sweeney uses digital tools and AI to try to answer these questions and conjure her father, who died thirty years ago: My Deepfake Dad.

Sarah Sweeney, 2024/5, audio

Worm(W)Holes

The black hole is not far afield from how some might regard AI – a data-scraping absorber and regurgitative model of pseudo-creation. A parasite. Enter the white hole: a font, a wellspring, ‘a way out of the black hole and back into the universe’ (Carlo Rovelli, 2024). Our Wormhole artists, in pushing AI to extremes, are striving to find the white-hole potential of this technology. Their work prioritises patterns, rhythm, coherence and de-coherence. There’s something of the quantum, the ethereal, in their approaches; and perhaps, even amongst the obvious ‘enshittification’, there are glimpses of a beautiful new world.


Beautiful the Chewed Sounds is a meditation on the meeting of analogue and artificial worlds, speaking through layers of image, word and sound. A six-minute looped video, collages and texts activate one another – sparking open, rhizomatic chains of connection. The work mixes references to nature, bodies, and machines until they begin to blur together, making it difficult to tell where one thing ends and another begins.

Maria Ahmed, 2025, audio-visual and digital download



Inspired by Degas’ obsession inscribed in the creation of Dancers Practising in the Foyer (1870–1900), framed by two AI paratexts, Tracing the Hollow shows presence and absence through three digital stages of a moth: its natural form, a Hough-lines translation, and a Delaunay triangulation.

Kasper Bergholt, 2025, photography


ghosting myself withholds the image, showing what lies beneath. Absence acts as generative ground where glitch powers the surface. In a noise-filled hole, a spectral diary turns the image inside out, choreographing the small weather of feelings, and whispers: I wrote a poem. Can I read it to you?

Evangelia Danadaki, 2025, moving image (single-channel video), 3.19 mins



BHAM💥 – The Black Hole Aesthetic Machine – is an imaginary product and service designed to help humans come to terms with their impending obsolescence. It processes whatever temporary configurations (human, machine, theistic entity) engage with it and has no interest in the entity’s interpretation – be that honest recommendation, dark humour, or outright insult.

Sarah-Jane Field, 2025, website


Human-ware reimagines binary code as a libidinal DNA, where 0s and 1s generate hybrid digital bodies. Through a browser dress-up game, players remix code and flesh, revealing desire as computational syntax. Sexuality and identity emerge from data’s fluid logic, questioning eroticism when bodies become mutable, machine-generated architectures.

Angel Qin, 2025, digital game

Programme

Coming Soon!   


Look out for a Doughnut (W)Hole Bookclub, which will run throughout the duration of The Wrong Biennale. We’ll be starting with Carlo Rovelli’s White Holes (2024). Keep an eye out on social media or check here for details.

New events will be announced throughout the biennale run. Please follow the artists, curator @kimshawphotography or producer @sarahjane.field on Instagram for news, or check back here.  
Past Events

1st and 2nd November 2025        


Our opening weekend took place, to use The Wrong's phrase, in an embassy – an in-person pop-up exhibition at HAPAX Living Room – with talks, funding surgeries, art and of course, doughnuts. 

Recordings are available to watch on our YouTube Channel, The (W)Hole Doughnut Stand.


Saturday 1st November 2025


12:00–13:30 | Worm(W)Holes
Living Room
Talk with Dr Jane Boyer  

Finitude marks the point where we end and others begin. Does AI deprive us of the sense of finitude?  Is it frightening in part because we no longer see the end to ourselves, but a terrifying mash of an undifferentiated state of sameness? Dr Jane Boyer's talk will be a meditation on Kaja Silverman's writing on finitude, as Boyer believes this may be the crux of the question in The Doughnut (W)Hole and in the wider existential crisis of photography.

Following the talk, Gisela Torres chaired a roundtable with Dr Jane Boyer and pavilion artists, Sarah-Jane Field and Maria Ahmed.

Recording

12:00–14:30 | Funding Surgery
Office
Funding and Project Development Surgeries with Dr Justin Hunt 

Dr Justin Hunt is a curator, researcher, and coach based in London. Justin supports individuals and businesses to think creatively about their development. In these 25-minute surgeries, practitioners can explore challenges and opportunities arising in their practice, from getting started to rebuilding, funding strategy, and marketing strategy. Justin can support your thinking to make actionable decisions that move your project/practice forward.

15:00–16:00 | Performing (W)Holes
Living Room
Talk with Evangelia Danadaki

This talk explores the link between philosophy, technology and artistic practice by approaching the (w)hole as a performative space where absence generates relations and surprising visibilities. Rather than a void to be filled, the hole is understood as a luminous and caring opening to be felt, a screen where images come into presence through unexpected projections. Through her video-film ghosting myself, Evangelia Danadaki reflects on how visual forms of writing can act as gestures of meaning-making and care, allowing the image to recompose itself and expose its own fragility and criticality: how might art perform the (w)hole not as lack, but as a shared space that holds and carries?

Evangelia Danadaki is an artist and PhD candidate in feminist philosophy and psychoanalysis at the University of Leeds (School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies).


Sunday 2 November 2025


12:00–14:00 | Memory(W)Holes
Living Room
Talk with Dr Caroline Molloy

In this session, Memory Hole: The fallibility of Memory - Dr Caroline Molloy introduced a tenet that emerged out of her PhD research that questions what happens to memory in the Age of Digital Photography; when the physical photograph can allegorically be created and recreated. How does this impact personal and collective memories?  She will then lead a conversation with selected artists who have developed work to either open or close memory holes through digital and AI photographies.

Artists: Sarah Deane, Alan Knox, Heidi Reece
Recording

14:30–16:00 | Pot(W)Holes
Living Room
Talk with Dr Madeline Yale Preston

Long before AI became a household name, artists were foraging on the frontiers of synthetic creativity – montage, appropriation and digital manipulation.  In this session, Madeline Yale Preston explored the question of what shifts and how, in the age of AI - is it the practice itself or our relationship with it?

Artists: Ben Millar Cole, Duncan Petrie
Recording

 


   Look out for further events and activities throughout the Biennale’s run.  
About The Wrong Biennale

The Wrong Biennale is an expansive, decentralised art event that unites artists, curators, institutions, and the public through a global exhibition of exhibitions. Organised and hosted both online and offline by independent curators, it showcases selected digital artworks within pavilions and embassies worldwide. The Wrong has earned widespread recognition and accolades from the global press, art community, and public.  It has received awards such as SOIS Cultura and an honorific mention from the European Commission’s S+T+ARTS prize. The Wrong is an institutional member of the International Biennial Association.

From an article titled What’s Right About the Wrong Biennale? in The New York Times (2018);

Counting its viewership in the millions, The Wrong just might be the world’s largest art biennale — the digital world’s answer to Venice. To visit, art lovers needn’t purchase a plane ticket, book a hotel or queue outside galleries: Admission requires only internet access...
The Wrong’s magic lies in the sense of discovery yielded by a simple click.   
Acknowledgements & Credits


THANK YOU!

This pavilion exists thanks to the generosity of everyone involved — the artists, speakers, and contributors whose passion for creativity, knowledge in all its forms, and experimental playfulness made it possible. The following contributors, in particular, in addition to the artists, helped to make the pavilion flourish:

Dr Jane Boyer, Dr Flora Dunster, Dr Caroline Molloy, Christiane Monarchi, Sam Mercer, Dr Madeline Yale Preston, Gisela Torres.






CREDITS

Curated by Kim Shaw

Web design/implementation and co-produced by Sarah-Jane Field

Additional technical and practical support: Maria Ahmed, Sarah Deane and Duncan Petrie. 

Live streaming support for Welcome to the Past at HAPAX Living Room: Arthur Field. 





If you have scrolled all the way down without clicking any links, well done for doing all that reading! But now, please go and see some work via the embedded links on the Pot, Memory and Worm (W)Holes or via the artists’ names.