Aubade: Fani Boudouroglou explores the fragile boundaries between animal, machine and perception

A quadrupedal robot draped in animal hide emerges from the darkness of a riverside forest at dawn. Moving through tall grasses, pine trees and along the edge of a stream, it appears both familiar and unsettling, suspended somewhere between creature and machine. With Aubade, her new video installation presented at Beetroot House in Thessaloniki, visual artist Fani Boudouroglou continues her ongoing investigation into the shifting relationships between humans, animals and technology.

The work follows Boston Dynamics’ robotic dog Spot, renamed KYON (“Dog”), as it traverses a landscape caught between night and day. The addition of an animal hide attached to its mechanical body creates a striking visual paradox: a technological entity carrying the remains of an animal presence while openly revealing the mechanisms that hold the disguise together. Rather than concealing its artificiality, the gesture foregrounds questions of construction, memory and transformation.

The title Aubade refers to a poetic form associated with daybreak, a transitional moment when darkness gives way to light and visibility remains uncertain. Boudouroglou uses this liminal state to examine the conditions through which we perceive, recognise and assign meaning. As the robot navigates the landscape, passing an abandoned wasp nest, a camping lantern and finally pausing at the riverbank to face its own reflection, the work invites viewers to question what they are actually witnessing: observation, self-awareness, programmed behaviour, or merely their own projections.

Central to the installation is the notion of inherited movement. Designed through research that studied animal balance, responsiveness and orientation, the robot carries a behavioural memory derived from the dog. Yet the reciprocity that once defined the human-animal relationship has disappeared. What remains is a mechanical body performing gestures detached from their original context and repurposed within technological systems of operation.

Presented in the subterranean space of Beetroot House, a building whose history includes functioning as a roadside inn, the installation activates ideas of passage, pause and temporary coexistence. Through projection and sound, the work shapes the viewer’s movement and orientation in space, encouraging sustained observation rather than spectacle. The slow unfolding of the image redirects attention toward duration, subtle shifts and the act of looking itself.

An interdisciplinary visual artist based in Thessaloniki, Fani Boudouroglou works across moving image, installation, sound and interactive environments. Her practice frequently explores unstable states between the real and the virtual, the human and the non-human, creating works that leave multiple interpretations open. Her projects have been presented internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, MOMus institutions, the Thessaloniki Biennale and the Larnaca Biennale.

Curated by Panos Giannikopoulos, Aubade will be on view at Beetroot House from 16 to 26 June 2026. An opening conversation between the artist and curator will take place on 16 June, offering further insight into a work that quietly unsettles our assumptions about technology, memory and the ways we see ourselves reflected in the non-human world.