“Wait… How did we get here?” This question forms the basis for a subversive and multi-themed program entitled “Wait… How did we get here?” which is presented at MOMUS-Experimental Center for the Arts in Thessaloniki, in collaboration with XenoVisual Studies Collective (XVS), from February 14 to June 14, 2026, and includes an art exhibition, club nights, artistic workshops, an artist residency program, educational programs, and guided tours.

MOMUS-Experimental Arts Center, a space for exploring, showcasing, and promoting experimental artistic projects, is collaborating for the first time with the fluid collective XenoVisual Studies Collective (XVS), which operates as a network of artistic experimentation and critical thinking and studies how new technologies redefine aesthetics, reality, identity, and society. The common goal of the collaboration is to create a space for experimentation, reflection, and interconnection, where artists engage in interdisciplinary research, processing different art forms as means of enhancing critical and creative engagement with new technologies, artificial intelligence, and digital systems, while promoting decolonial, queer, trans/fem, and crip (+) approaches to perception, knowledge, and relationship with the world (+).

The residency program, artistic workshops, educational programs, and guided tours will be announced in detail during the exhibition.

Curated by Domna Gounari / MOMUS-Experimental Center for the Arts, Nensi Brama, Dimitri, Mar Osés, Pilar del Puerto, Esther Rizo-Casado / XenoVisual Studies Collective (XVS)

Aphrodite Psarra, Ventriloquist Ontology, 2021, video and clothing, video duration: 9 min 46 sec

«Wait…How did we get here?»

14 February – 14 June 2026

MOMUS-Experimental Center for the Arts (Warehouse Β1, Pier Α, Thessaloniki Port)

Opening: Saturday, 14 February 2026, 20:00

The exhibition “Wait…How did we get here?” presents the works of 20 Greek and international artists and artistic groups, focusing on critical issues such as technological disharmony, systemic inequalities, and the ways in which digital infrastructures are entangled with histories of exploitation, surveillance, and violence. Through interdisciplinary and expanded artistic practices, the works in the exhibition—video installations, projections, constructions, wall sculptures, sculpture-clothing, and digital prints—explore how new technologies, artificial intelligence, and the rhetoric of innovation shape contemporary existence, often reproducing colonial narratives that are covered up by the dominant narrative.

The parallel world mapped out in the exhibition creates the most appropriate framework for us to explore and imagine all the possible futures that emerge and converge in it.

Artists: Babak Ahteshamipour, Margarita Athanasiou , Amanda Bennetts, Captain Stavros, Katerina Giannopoulou , DREAMFacta, Iro Drossos, Nash Drymousi, Daniel Felstead & Jenn Leung, Eleni Thiresia, Puneet Jain, Foteini Korre, Iro Kretza Karavia, Julie-Michèle Morin, Eliana Ranti, Marisa Satsia, Nana Sachini, Vera Chotzoglou, Afroditi Psarra.

The exhibition also features artist Aikaterini Gegisian, with her installation THIRD PERSON (PLURAL), presented in collaboration with the Thessaloniki Film Festival. The film version of the work will be screened at the 28th Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival.

Club Nights & Performances 

14 & 28 March 2026

Club Nights—DJ sets, live sets, and hybrid audiovisual performances—are a series of sound encounters that fit organically into the broader context of the project. They focus on post-electronic sound practices that shape post-club environments and listening experiences, with references to ambient, noise, and experimental music.

Babak Ahteshamipour, Unborn in the Sugar-Coated Caffeine Induced Heat of the Moment, 2025, video installation

Club Metanoia 

14 March 2026, 20:30-23:30

MOMUS-Experimental Center for the Arts (Warehouse Β1, Pier Α, Port of Thessaloniki)

DJ and live sets by Ionoss, Apunanu, and Angel’s Corpse, performance “Desbridar: Abrirse camino hacia una nueva boca” by Post-Organic Bauplan (Josefina Maro × Salvador Marino) in collaboration with Oliver Torr and Tasya.

The work explores the co-evolution of human bodies and robotic organisms through dance, live music, and lighting.

Admission with exhibition ticket.

Club Akryliko 

28 March 2026, 20:00-23:00 

Kotetsi (Valaoritou 19, Thessaloniki)

Pink.wav (DJ set), Chivari (live set), Eleni Thiresia (live set), and Foteini Korre (live set with instruments and vocals) move the soundscape between intense bass, hypnotic vocals, and experimental forms of sound production.

Free admission.