Janis Rafa

Janis Rafa (b. 1984, Greece) lives and works between Amsterdam and Athens. She was a resident at the Rijksakademie (2013–14, The Netherlands) as an Onassis scholar and a fellow at ARTWORKS Stavros Niarchos Foundation (2020, Greece). She holds an MA and PhD in Fine Art (University of Leeds, 2012).

Her first institutional solo exhibition in Greece will be presented at EMST | National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, in April 2025. Her work was part of the 59th La Biennale di Venezia, “The Milk of Dreams,” curated by Cecilia Alemani (2022).

Her body of work combines film, video installation, sculpture, spatial installations, text, and drawing, in which the non-human, non-logocentric agency is recognized in order to reveal political and ethical dimensions, as another kind of archaeology. Her moving image work is set at the margins of the urban, haunted by stray dogs, roadkill, hunted prey, forgotten ruins, and abandonment. Dead and living, human and non-human beings coexist in an accord of dream and sensuality forming a visual language that relies on muteness, physicality, and the tactile. The cryptic and universal nature of these cinematic worlds is initiated by a certain realism that has very little to do with the landscape’s usual representation, searching for the invisible, the mythical, and the occult.

Her work has been exhibited in various venues, amongst them, Eye Filmmuseum (solo, 2023 / 2021 / 2016), opbo studio (solo, 2023), Centraal Museum (solo, 2019), MAXXI (2022 / 2020), Fundació Antoni Tàpies (2021), Goethe-Institut Athen (2021), State of Concept Athens (2020), Manifesta 12 (2018), Mardin Biennial (2018), Palazzo Medici Riccardi (2017), Centre d’art Contemporain Chanot (2017), Kunsthalle Munster (2017), Martin van Zomeren (2016 / 2014), Palazzo Strozzi (2015). Her recent work has been supported by EMST, Eye Filmmuseum, ART for the World, Fondazione In Between Art Film, Mondriaan Fund, Netherland Film Fund, and the Greek Film Centre. Rafa’s work is part of several institutional and private collections, including Stedelijk Museum, Centraal Museum, Museum Voorlinden, Fondazione In Between Art Film, Dommering Foundation, and Onassis Foundation.

In the last few years, Rafa has expanded her practice in filmmaking as a film director and scriptwriter after her first feature film, “Kala Azar” (2020). She is currently developing her second feature, entitled “The Future is an Elder Cow” (2025/26), in collaboration with Heretic productions.

Janis Rafa participated in the Onassis AiR Tailor-made Residencies program 2023/24.