The exhibition Tracing Angel’s Men presents the latest artistic research by Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert, situated within Alessandro Cazzola’s wider curatorial project An Archaeological Museum at the Threshold, which addresses the transitional moment of the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia as it prepares to move to a new building.

Tracing Angel’s Men reveals Stylianou-Lambert’s deep engagement with archaeology and the histories it produces, reflecting on continuity and memory transmission through the convergence of archival research and community engagement. It foregrounds the human dimensions of archaeological and anthropological investigation, questioning systems of classification, documentation and archiving by returning attention to everyday life, individual identities and collective histories.

Through artistic intervention and AI, Stylianou-Lambert revisits the American anthropologist John Lawrence Angel’s fieldwork in Cyprus in 1949, undertaken at Porfyrios Dikaios’s invitation, asking how these records might be reinterpreted, expanded and re-humanised. Angel resided in the former mixed village of Episkopi, where alongside his studies of skeletal remains from archaeological excavations, he conducted anthropometric surveys of local residents as part of his research into the island’s population history.
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Stylianou-Lambert researched Angel’s archive, now held at the Smithsonian Institution in the United States, to trace the genealogy of those who participated in his research, many of whom were also involved in archaeological work in the area. Fieldwork in Episkopi, coordinated by Thalia Efthymiou, helped trace the descendants of the men, who were then invited to contribute stories and photographs of their family’s everyday life.

The artist brings these lives and experiences back into visibility through a playful and participatory approach, inviting visitors to encounter the archive as a space of exchange and reactivation. The project turns both toward the archive and what lies beyond it: fragments, silences and the intimate dimensions of human experience. Like archaeology, archival knowledge is necessarily partial. Stylianou-Lambert embraces this incompleteness as a point of departure, using interactive methods to reconnect people, family memories and social relations obscured within the historical record.

Research: Thalia Efthymiou
Exhibition designer: Eleonora Antoniadou
Graphic designer: Nour Moustafa

about the artist

Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert is a visual artist/researcher whose work explores photography, museums, archives and new technologies. She has shown her work internationally in exhibition spaces such as the Jeu de Paume (France), Smithsonian Institute (USA), Hasselblad Foundation (Sweden), Kunsthal Aarhus (Denmark), the High Commission of the Republic of Cyprus in London (UK), and many more. She has received a Smithsonian Fellowship in Museum Practice (USA), a Fulbright Fellowship (USA), an Arts and Humanities Research Council Award (UK) and a Moa Martinson visiting professorship at Linköping University, Sweden. She is professor at the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts of the Cyprus University of Technology.