New exhibition looks at how photos have aged
Artist Sergis Hadjiadamos returns with a new exhibition in Nicosia at Gloria Gallery this month – Metamorphosis opens Wednesday and will run until the 22nd.
The exhibition, as its title suggests, deals with the alteration of objects due to physical deterioration and the metamorphosis of the humans. “This very exhibition is a manifestation of intervention,” commented director of the A.G. Leventis Foundation Charalambos Bakirtzis.
“It starts from the glass plate negatives that belonged to Spyros Haritou, the photographer of Paphos (1901-1990), then carries on via these glass plates and in fact ends with them – but in the meantime, they have been modified in order to take on a larger meaning than the glass plates Sergis found in the Haritou’s basement.”
Haritou was born in Kissonerga in 1901 and had for decades been the photographer of Paphos, tracing faces, families, groups of friends and landscapes onto glass with Balzac-esque indulgence. Sergis set out to use Haritou’s archive to bring out an album of unpublished photographs, an exhibition of daily life in Paphos – akin to what he had done with the 1974 bomb-wrecked port of Paphos.
While looking through the archive, something happened, Bakirtzis said. “In Sergis’ own words: ‘Time had left its signature upon the glass plate. Humidity in the room had fused into the plates, crafting its own imaginary worlds’. The ‘natural, random fusion of the plates’ brought to the surface a disfigurement of reality. The artist’s interest was intrigued by the random transfiguration of the objects, namely the glass plates, but also the random albeit definitive metamorphosis of the people pictured on them along with the vagueness of their identity. And so he changed course: instead of creating a photographic album, he set up this exhibition.”
Hadjiadamos was born in South Africa in 1975. His father was Andy Hadjiadamos, a Greek-Cypriot sculptor and writer, and his mother is Jennyfer Lyn Thomson, a South African x-ray radiographer. The family moved back to Paphos in 1980.
He began his first steps in art at the age of 15 after his father passed away. He moved to Athens in 1994 to study art. In 2003 he returned to Cyprus to hold his first solo exhibition Victoria – Kifisia, showing his audience for the first time the use of modern technology by exposing them to digital art.
Metamorphosis
Solo exhibition by Sergis Hadjiadamos. January 8-22. Gloria Gallery, Nicosia. Opening night: 7.30pm. Monday Friday: 10.30am-12.45pm and 5.30pm-8pm. Saturday: 10.30am-12.45pm. Tel: 22-762605
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