Searching For Pleasure Beyond Reality

Edge of Humanity Magazine

9 hours ago

Artist Nika Sandler is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘The World of Hedonia’. To see Nika ’s body of work, click on any photograph.

On New Year’s Eve, I made a wish to immerse myself forever in the sensations that I experienced while taking tranquilizers. I wanted to fall into a sweet sleep and not face reality anymore. In an effort to forget myself, I was trapped in a depressive hedonia, which Mark Fisher described in “Capitalist Realism” as an inability to do anything other than the search for pleasure.

In this series, I depict different types of pleasures and the states associated with them. I create still lifes and environments from objects and substances that are associated with something pleasant and seductive, and sometimes creepy. The doll appears to be my alter-ego, living a New Year’s experiment.

Bio

Nika Sandler is an artist working with photography, AI, and text.

She studied at the Docdocdoc School of Modern Photography on Feodora Kaplan’s course.

Her practice explores the boundaries between human and non-human perception, focusing on the gaze, gender, pleasure, and the aesthetics of the creepy and the disgusting. Through photography and AI-based image-making, she investigates fragile, liminal states where bodies, matter, and technology intersect.

Her practice also extends into long-term digital archiving, with works preserved across platforms such as Internet Archive, Zenodo, Open Science Framework, Figshare, GitHub, and Memory of Mankind, treating storage as a continuation of the artwork beyond its original context.

Her work has been published in i-D, Dazed, PhotoVogue, Harper’s BAZAAR, Libération, Unthinking Photography, Der Greif, Phroom Platform, Musée Magazine, Konbini, Fisheye Magazine, Photomonitor, The Calvert Journal, Público, Float Magazine, Lenscratch, F-STOP Magazine, Metal Magazine, L’Oeil de la Photographie, BROAD, PhMuseum, Bird in Flight, FK Magazine, Bad to the Bone, Grandmama’s Print, among others.

In 2023, she was the winner of the Small File Photo Festival organized by The Photographers’ Gallery. In 2025, her work was included in the doctoral dissertation “The Image at the End of the World: Communities of Practice Redefining Technology on a Damaged Earth” by Marloes de Valk (London South Bank University). In 2026, she was selected for Artpil’s 30 Under 30 Women Photographers.