Semina Milarokosta Dresses Her Characters for a Planet They Are Not Leaving

Semina Milarokosta's X-Side at OKAY Initiative Space in Athens

A padded glove with a camera. A sculpture with wings, hair and motors. At X-Side in Athens, Semina Milarokosta brought together objects that look like they belong somewhere between a costume department, a science-fiction film and a world of their own. Presented at OKAY initiative space in March 2025, the exhibition was curated by Captain Stavros.

The show took place at Kefallinias 7 in the Kypseli district. Its sculptures run on electronics. The Glove is a padded white sculpture with a single-board computer, a camera and an LED panel.

The Wheel of Fortune is a kinetic sculpture of white plexiglass and MDF with a motor and LED light. Morfoplasma Inana carries real wings, real and synthetic hair, Arduino motors and a tablet that plays a video performance.

A helmet with Arduino and LEDs is part of the group. Below, Kostis Stafylakis, whose text accompanied the show, explains how these objects and the videos around them belong together.

Exhibition Text by Kostis Stafylakis

Semina Milarokosta’s solo exhibition at OKAY Initiative space takes the form of an “overture” in three parts, foreshadowing the actions of three characters embodied by the artist herself.

The central question running through her practice—from her studies at the Athens School of Fine Arts to the present—concerns how women inhabit (cyber)space: how they think it, shape it, and share it. This question becomes particularly urgent at a time when the unchecked power of the tech elite promotes fantasies of extraterrestrial escape and oligarchic colonization.

The heroines of Milarokosta’s videos do not seek new planetary grounds; instead, they intrude into former industrial sites, tracing restless paths without a clear destination. They navigate the ruins of Athens’ industrial zone, transforming the landscape into a playful terrain as emancipated NPCs.

These three figures emerge from a post-digital environment where distinctions between the physical and the virtual self, online and offline life, play and everyday reality, begin to dissolve. Through practices of self-staging, they claim fashion, movement, “weird posing,” and eroticism via an expanded approach to costuming.

The exhibition space operates simultaneously as environment and field of action. It is inhabited by exoskeletons, humanoid forms, and hybrid objects that disrupt conventional modes of viewing and resist being perceived as autonomous exhibits. The world that unfolds reactivates the potential of feminist science fiction to reshape and challenge social roles.