SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Sergis Hadjiadamos is a South African-born Cypriot artist working across painting, mixed media, digital image-making, archival material, and curatorial research. Born in Johannesburg in 1975 and raised in Cyprus, he studied freehand drawing in Athens and completed a BA in Graphic Design in 2001. His practice has developed through digital mixed-media art, painting, publishing, exhibition-making, historical documentation, and archive-based research.
His current work centres on deteriorated and fused early twentieth-century glass negative plates, which he transforms through scanning, digital extraction, recomposition, enlargement, printing, and mixed-media intervention. Rather than restoring damaged photographic material, Hadjiadamos treats archival decay, humidity damage, accidental fusion, chemical deterioration, and image loss as generative material for producing new contemporary artworks.
His major projects include Paphos Souls, awarded the Honour of Excellence at the Larnaca Biennale in 2018, Metamorphosis, Metamorphosis 2, Reconstructing Our Common Values, and Whatever Remains, Turn It Into Art. His wider practice engages with photographic afterlives, cultural memory, displacement, authorship, digital circulation, and the curatorial transformation of damaged archival material.
BIOGRAPHY
Sergis Hadjiadamos is a South African-born Cypriot artist whose practice operates across photography, mixed media, digital image-making, archival material, and curatorial research. Born in Johannesburg in 1975 and raised in Cyprus from 1980, Hadjiadamos’s work is shaped by cultural displacement, inherited memory, and the transformation of historical remains into contemporary visual form. He studied Fine Art in Athens before completing a BA in Graphic Design in 2001, developing a practice informed by image construction, material experimentation, publishing, exhibition-making, and digital technologies.
Hadjiadamos’ current practice centres on deteriorated and fused early twentieth-century glass negative plates, which he approaches not as objects to be restored, but as unstable photographic remains capable of generating new images. Through scanning, digital extraction, recomposition, enlargement, printing, and mixed-media intervention, he transforms chemical deterioration, humidity damage, accidental fusion, erosion, and image loss into contemporary artworks. His work examines the point at which photography moves beyond documentation and becomes a site of reconstruction, abstraction, and renewed curatorial meaning.
Since his first solo exhibition,Victoria - Kifisia, at Gloria Gallery in Nicosia in 2003, Hadjiadamos has developed a multidisciplinary artistic and curatorial career. His work has included digital mixed-media art, acrylic painting, historical documentation, artist publishing, archive-based projects, and public-facing curatorial initiatives. Between 2007 and 2012, he published Beach News, a local cultural publication in the Paphos district, while also developing independent projects connected to local memory, cultural heritage, and overlooked histories.
A significant part of Hadjiadamos’ practice has been shaped by curatorial work. In 2010, he curated a retrospective exhibition of his father, the artist and writer Andy Adamos Hadjiadamos, and published an accompanying bilingual book. In 2012, he developed the historical documentation project Paphos Harbour 1974, and in 2014 he curated Window Art, an intervention in abandoned shops in the old town of Paphos. In 2017, he curated Risky Travels for the European Capital of Culture programme, PAFOS2017, bringing together the work and histories of Andy Hadjiadamos and Baki Bogac in a dialogue shaped by displacement, conflict, and separated artistic inheritances.
Hadjiadamos’ archive-based work gained wider recognition in 2018 when Paphos Souls, a triptych developed from humidity-damaged glass negative plates, received the Honour of Excellence at the Larnaca Biennale. This work became a key point in the development of his ongoing Metamorphosis project, first presented as a solo exhibition at the Annabelle Hotel in Paphos in 2019 and later at Gloria Gallery in Nicosia in 2020. Further developments include Metamorphosis 2, presented in Athens in 2022, and Reconstructing Our Common Values, a digital art and NFT exhibition presented at AB Gallery in Paphos that same year. In 2025, he presented his sixth solo exhibition, Whatever Remains, Turn It Into Art, at Artos Gallery House in Nicosia.
His artistic language is grounded in the tension between archive and transformation. Rather than presenting the archive as fixed evidence of the past, Hadjiadamos works with its damaged, unstable, and partially illegible condition. The fused plate, the obscured figure, the chemical stain, and the fractured surface become active components in the making of new images. In this sense, his practice proposes archival decay as generative material: a process through which historical photographic remains are reactivated as curatable contemporary images.
Hadjiadamos’ work contributes to current debates around photographic afterlives, material memory, cultural heritage digitisation, authorship, digital circulation, and the ethics of transforming found historical material. His practice is situated between Fine Art, photography, archive theory, digital image culture, and curatorial methodology, with a continuing focus on how damaged photographic archives can produce new forms of artistic knowledge.
Risky Travels Opening Speech. PAFOS2017 European Capital of Culture 2017.
Finding a chair in the middle of nowhere is a sign for relaxation!
At the opening of my exhibition Metamorphosis with mr. Charalambos Bakirtzis and my son Andy.
With the President of the Republic of Cyprus, Mr. Nicos Anastasiades, at the opening of the 'Risky Travels' exhibition, which I curated. The event took place under the auspices of Pafos2017, the European Capital of Culture.