A slight indisposition

The exhibition A slight indisposition opening on the 26th of June, 2026 at the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, associated with the Pierides Foundation [NiMAC] brings together sixteen emerging and established contemporary artists across Cyprus and abroad, exploring notions of transformation as a site for negotiation or reconciliation between sentience, sapience, and space.

Taking its title and conceptual framework from Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), widely regarded as one of the most significant literary works of the twentieth century, A slight indisposition reflects on transformation as both a disturbance of certainty and a fundamental condition of existence. The phrase operates as a euphemism for the dissonance at the heart of Kafka’s narrative, where irreversible change is met with eerie calm and muted distress.

The continued relevance of Kafka’s simultaneously recognisable and unreal world resonates with contemporary life, marked by global socio-economic tensions, wars, inequality, and degraded environmental systems. The exhibition probes systems shaped by anthropocentric desires and aversions, considering how lived experience is refracted through technology, communication infrastructures, economic pressures, ecological interdependence, and conflicting social perspectives.

Within this context, transformation is approached as both unsettling and generative: a source of erasure, anxiety, confusion, adaptation, and possibility. The selected artworks present metamorphosis not only as rupture, but also as a condition of being and becoming, tracing the malleability of memory, shifting perceptions of time and distance, and cycles of decay, loss, and rebirth across personal, ecological, and geographical histories.

Drawing on key texts in mythology, ecology, the philosophy of becoming, and theories of psychological transformation that understand life as a continuous process rather than a succession of fixed identities, A slight indisposition reflects on how bodies, memories, environments, and social and cultural realities are continually reshaped through their relations with one another. Through large- and small-scale audiovisual works, material and immaterial installations, performative actions, photographic series, paintings, drawings, and works on paper, the exhibition stages shared anxieties and states of alienation against collective acts of wishing, the alchemical potential of change, dreamlike encounters, somatic experience, and the dissolution of binary structures. Gradually unfolding into darker territories, the works engage archetypal motifs from mythology and psychology, repetition, and entangled virtual realities, addressing repressed desires and the enduring cycles of brutality, violation, and denial.