Two artists, one a plastic surgeon, show new work among the Cyprus Museum's antiquities before its move

The Cyprus Museum in Nicosia is giving its galleries to two living artists, the plastic surgeon Andreas Mallouris and Leontios Toumpouris, for With What Remains, an exhibition curated by Cristina Anglada. The Department of Antiquities announced the show on 27 October. It opens on 6 November 2026 and closes on 31 January 2027, with free entry.

Two artists among the antiquities

Both artists have made site-specific work that responds to particular exhibits and rooms. Mallouris brings his surgical experience into his art. According to the Department, he works with healing, vulnerability and the body, through flowers, tools, scars, the working hand and small acts of care, and he treats a wound at once as a place of knowledge, identification and care. The release names the statement his work draws on: "outside of the womb, all wounds leave scars".

Toumpouris approaches archaeology, the land and the museum itself through sculpture, fiction and collective processes. The Department describes his contribution as a response to a building caught between two states, in which an unfinished outcome becomes room for development and speculation.

Fragments and repair

The exhibition's themes are the fragment, reconstruction, memory and care. For the organisers, reconstruction means interpretation, care and imagination, with no aim of restoring an original or complete state, and a fragment can begin something new as well as stand for a loss. The material the artists work from is broad: archaeological fragments and damaged objects, but also bodies and scars, memories, places, stories and forms of knowledge.

The opening is at 19:00 on 6 November. Pylon Art & Culture, the arts space in Limassol, and the BA in Fine Art programme of the Department of Design and Multimedia at the University of Nicosia support the show.

A museum preparing to move

The show falls in the museum's last stretch in its old home. According to the Department, the main collection is being prepared for a new building, with a new architectural and museological plan. That building, the new Archaeological Museum of Cyprus, has been under construction near the medieval walls of Nicosia since January 2023 to a design by XZA Architects. It was due by 3 February 2027, but on 30 September MPs on the House education committee heard that it will not be handed over before 2028.

The museum itself goes back to 1882, and its present home on Museum Street came out of a design competition held in 1906. The old building is to stay in use after the collections leave. In July the Department said it would keep its headquarters there and use the galleries for repatriated antiquities, donated objects and an exhibition on the history of the museum and of Cypriot archaeology, while still hosting exhibitions, concerts and performances. It gave that answer when an artist proposed housing the future State Museum of Contemporary Art in the old building, an idea the Department turned down (our report).

Artists in the old galleries

With What Remains is the latest of several projects that bring living artists into the museum during its last years on Museum Street. Pylon, one of its backers, is also host to An Archaeological Museum at the Threshold, Alessandro Cazzola's curatorial project on the Cyprus Museum as it prepares for the move. Its current part, Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert's Tracing Angel's Men, on families from Episkopi, runs at Pylon in Limassol until 19 December (our report).

Inside the museum, the Department's Artist Talks for kids bring invited artists into the galleries to talk with children aged 7 to 12 about the animals shown in the collection, on Saturdays until 12 December (our report). The theatre group ΣΕΖΟΝ Γυναίκες has also used the galleries as the set for a performance of Natalie Haynes's Stone Blind, a retelling of the Medusa myth (our report).