Historical Timeline

Introduction to Metamorphosis Art

Collections / Galleries - The Project - DailyActive on X

2026 Creative Expansion - Exhibition Paphos 2025 - 2025 Exhibition Nicosia - 2024 Experimenting - 2023 Creating Art - 2022 (Exh. Year) - 2021 During Covid 19 - 2020 Research - 2019 (Exh. Year) - 2018 (Award) - 2016/17 First Impressions - 2006 The Discovery

This timeline traces the development of Sergis Adamos’s archive-based practice from the discovery of the glass negative archive in 2006 to its transformation into the ongoing Metamorphosis Art Project. The project is rooted in deteriorated and fused early twentieth-century glass negatives, whose damaged surfaces have become the foundation for a contemporary body of work.
The timeline follows the archive from its discovery in 2006 through the gradual development of works, collections, exhibitions, and research. It shows how damaged photographic material became the basis for a sustained artistic language shaped by scanning, digital isolation, enlargement, recomposition, and physical intervention.
Metamorphosis is now the central long-term project within Sergis Adamos’s practice. It brings together the archive’s historical significance, the material condition of damaged glass negatives, and their transformation into contemporary digital and physical artworks.
Rather than treating the negatives only as historical documents, the project approaches their damaged condition as active material. Fusion, corrosion, stains, fractures, and image loss become part of the visual language of the work. In this process, decay is not treated as the end of the image, but as the condition through which a new image can emerge.
The Metamorphosis Art Project investigates what remains within the damaged plates: traces of people, places, gestures, social memory, and photographic history. It connects the local history of Paphos with broader questions of memory, disappearance, preservation, and artistic transformation.
The timeline should be read as both an artistic record and a research framework. It documents how the archive moved from discovery and preservation toward contemporary image-making, exhibition, and future institutional development.
Selected works from the project are available as signed giclée prints, limited editions, canvas works with acrylic intervention, and digital works. For acquisitions, commissions, exhibition proposals, or institutional enquiries, visitors may use the contact page.

Interior view of the archive as discovered. On the left are shelves where the glass plates were stacked; at the back is the entrance connecting the basement to the town’s old water canal.

Born in South Africa and raised in Cyprus, Sergis Adamos develops an archive-based contemporary art practice rooted in deteriorated early twentieth-century glass negatives. His work transforms photographic damage, chemical decay, accidental fusion, and image loss into contemporary digital works, giclée prints, and canvas works with acrylic intervention.

His work does not attempt to return the archive to its original state; it reveals how damaged images can generate new forms, figures, and meanings.

Motivated by the condition in which the glass negative archive of Cypriot photographer Spyros Haritou (1901–1991) was discovered, Sergis Adamos undertook the challenge of transforming damaged photographic material into contemporary art.

Before developing Metamorphosis, Sergis Adamos had already established a practice in painting, digital image-making, exhibition projects, and curatorial work. His background, shaped by Cyprus, South Africa, and his father’s artistic legacy, continues to inform the way he works with memory, image, and material transformation.

In his own words, the figures appear as “shadows reviving from the past, merging in a quiet dance, pushing each other towards the sight of light.” Through this approach, Sergis Adamos asks viewers to see transformation not as restoration, but as a passage between disappearance and renewed visibility.