Janis Rafa (b.1984, Greece) lives and works between Amsterdam and Athens. Her body of work combines film, video installation and sculpture, in order to grow attention to a non-anthropocentric, non-logocentric notion of subjectivities and places. 


Her moving image work balances between an empirical perception of landscapes and events and an authentic representation of them. Her narratives are located at the margins of the urban, haunted by stray dogs, roadkills, hunted prey, forgotten ruins, abandonment and dissipated death. 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 its usual representation, searching for the invisible, the mythical and the occult. Rituals of farewelling, burying or unearthing, submitting or revenging form a circular pattern of narration in which the nonhuman agency is recognised in order to reveal political and ethical dimensions, as another kind of archaeology.


Rafa holds a PhD in Fine Art at University of Leeds (UK, 2012). She was a resident at the Rijksakademie (NL, 2013/14) and a fellow at ARTWORKS by S. Niarchos Foundation (GR, 2020). Her recent work has been supported by Fondazione In Between Art Film, ART for the World, Mondriaan Fund, Onassis Foundation, Netherland Film Fund and Greek Film Center. Her work will be presented at 59th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Cecilia Alemani.


Her debut feature film ‘Kala azar’ (2020) had its premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (KNF award) and at New Directors/New Films at MoMA (2021). The film has participated in 38 film festivals, receiving 9 awards.


Her work has been exhibited in various venues, amongst them: Bucharest Biennial (2021), Centraal Museum solo-exhibition (NL, 2019), Goethe-Institut (GR, 2021), MAXXI (2020), State of Concept Athens (2020), Manifesta 12 (2018), Palazzo Medici Riccardi (2017), Centre d’art Contemporain Chanot (2017), Mardin Biennial (2018), Kunsthalle Munster (2017), EYE Filmmuseum (2016/ 2021), Palazzo Strozzi (2015). Rafa’s work is part of several institutional and private collections amongst them Stedelijk Museum, Centraal Museum, Museum Voorlinden and Fondazione In Between Art Film.