We would like to introduce you to our shortlisted artists. These artists explore wholes and holes with work that is ambitious, provocative and insightful. They are very much a part of the story of The Doughnut! You can see more of their work by following the links.
Julie Derbyshire is a photographic artist whose research-based practice explores themes of fragility, transience and our shared human condition. Informed by art history and lived experience, she combines beauty with an undercurrent of disquiet to interrogate the contradictory nature of our world. Her minimal, constructed images employ photography as the final distillation of a creative process involving fabrication, manipulation and disruption. She approaches photography as an instrument of illusion rather than documentation, crafting objects that she re-presents on the photographic plane through physical and digital interventions. By exploring the potential of the photographic object to conjure new meaning, she invites viewers to question what lies beyond the image.
The landscape of far northwest Scotland is the UK’s final bastion of ‘the wild’, yet it used to be blanketed in trees, now decimated through human activity and climate change. The images in this project are disrupted by over-layering with ethereal visions of trees and branches, intertwined and connected, but now awkwardly encroaching into traditional depictions of sublime beauty. The work offers a contemplation on what used to be, on what is and on the urgent need to protect and care for our fragile environment.
juliederbyshire.com
@juliederbyshire
Enrico Dedin (1996, Treviso) is a media artist and art director based in Venice. His video works are included in the catalogue of Heure Exquise!, distributor of the audiovisual collections of the Musée du Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay.He has been selected for prominent events and exhibitions, including the 16th Videoart Yearbook curated by art critic Renato Barilli, the Collettiva Giovani Artisti at Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, and The Wrong. His work has been featured in the book ‘L’arte del XXI secolo. Temi, linguaggi, artisti’ by Viviana Vannucci, an international curator and lecturer. He has received various awards and honours. He is the author of the literary manifesto of Metaluddism, published in the periodical Il Foglio Clandestino. Graduating with honours in ‘New Technologies of Art’ from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, he also works as an art director in the field of multimedia communication.
A code is always a codex, a law, but often we are unaware of it; the unreadability of these codes becomes a symptom and revelation of the law. The law of speed, fragmentation, spaceless and timeless simultaneity of the web, that modifies our way to gain experience and to interpret the world, bringing us closer to what it is far and moving away from what it is near, the media codify us in turn.
NR Code is the liberation from this logic, it’s the digital flow’s interruption as a necessary moment of reflection on it, it’s the code/non-code of the offline, suspension, ambiguity, doubt, silence and nothingness.
behance.net/enricodedin
@enrico.dedin
Eyez明瞳, from Haikou, China, raised across Ürümqi, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and now Montreal, creates immersive, non-linear works spanning XR film, interactive art, and indie games.
Recent projects include TamagotchU! (VIFF Signals, Mutek 2025), Entrance of Deity (ISEA2025 Seoul, ELEKTRA collection), Wandering at the Exit of Deity (29th Videomedeja, ISEA2025 Seoul), and Portal of Chaos (Beijing Times Art Museum, touring China).
TamagotchU reimagines AI as a decentralised system, using low-end devices as collaborative nodes. It challenges centralised monopolies and reduces carbon footprints through low-energy workflows and community input. The project promotes open-source, low-impact solutions, connecting to movements for lo-tech, frugal computing, and data sovereignty, resisting monopolistic AI control. Inspired by the Yangtze river pufferfish's cuteness and environmental sensitivity, it links human emotion to species-specific impacts.
@eyez.bin
Nasrah Omar is an interdisciplinary artist working with photography, installation, XR, and collage.
Her work has been shown at TV Centre (London), Pioneer Works (NY), The Photographers’ Gallery, and La MaMa Galleria, and featured in Aperture, Der Greif, and Portrait of Humanity Vol. 5. A recipient of Google’s Image Equity Fellowship and NYFA’s New Work Grant, Nasrah develops site-responsive practices merging AI/XR with collective healing and counter-archival research. She holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and is completing an MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art.
Technology enables contact with ancestral revenants through digital channels. AI chatbots and text exchanges become oracular tools—haunted interfaces for spectral voices. These digital dialogues, AR interventions, and medicinal plant recipes from Ayurveda resurface decolonial knowledge systems. The space echoes real-time rendered video games: nature fractures through containment grids, digital architectures overrun by flora and fungal networks. This entanglement between synthetic and elemental disrupts colonial schematics of space, time, and memory, allowing mycelial pathways of remembrance and repair to take root.
nasrahomar.com
@nasrah__omar
Nika Sandler works with photography, AI and text. She explores the themes of human and non-human gaze, gender, pleasure, creepiness and disgust. Her work has been published in i-D, Dazed, Libération, PhotoVogue, Unthinking Photography, Lenscratch, Musée Magazine, Photomonitor, Der Greif, Fisheye Magazine, Phroom Platform, Konbini, The Calvert Journal, Publico, Metal Magazine, PhMuseum, L'Oeil de la Photographie, BROAD, F-Stop, Float Magazine and many others. She is also the winner of the Small File Photo Festival 2023, organised by The Photographers' Gallery.
/nikasandler/
@nika.sandler