Out of Nowhere – A Bold Evolution
Sergis Hadjiadamos
Description
Out of Nowhere – A Bold Evolution is a wall installation composed of seven framed works derived from a single deteriorated early twentieth-century glass negative plate. Emerging from a damaged photographic source, the installation examines how time, humidity, chemical decay and material erosion can transform a historical image into a new contemporary visual field.
Rather than restoring the original photograph, the project isolates and develops the altered surfaces, residual forms and unstable image structures produced by deterioration. Some works evoke aerial terrains, rivers, swamps, forests and oceanic landscapes, while the central composition retains the spectral presence of human figures enclosed within a decayed photographic space. Together, the seven works move between figuration and abstraction, documentation and reinvention.
The installation responds to the theme of FLOWS through passage and transformation: the flow of time across the plate, the flow between image loss and image generation, and the flow between archival material and contemporary reconstruction. Here, damage is not an obstacle or deficiency, but the generative condition of the image itself.
This project marks an important development in the artists’s practice, expanding damaged archival material into a visual language shaped by erosion, fragmentation, atmosphere and re-composition.
credits
Original Photographer: Spyros Haritou (1901-1991)
Sergis Hadjiadamos
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 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.