BABY I’M YOURS, FOREVER

2026, Single-channel video installation, colour, 8.1 surround sound, 17'.

Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film, co-produced by Onassis Culture and Heretic with additional support from Mondriaan Fund, for the exhibition Canicula, 2026. Courtesy of the artist; Callirrhoë, Athens; FondazioneIn Between Art Film.

JANIS RAFA

Janis Rafa (1984, Greece) is an artist who lives and works between Amsterdam and Athens. Her works have been shown in solo and group exhibitions at Fondazione Merz, Turin; Salt, Istanbul; EMST – Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; VOX – Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal; M HKA, Antwerp; the Turku Art Museum; the Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam; the Biennale Arte 2022, Venice; the Museu Tàpies, Barcelona; and MAXXI, Rome. Rafa holds a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Leeds and was an art resident on the Onassis Air Program (2024), and Artworks – Stavros Niarchos Foundation (2020), among others. Her work has been supported by the Mondriaan Fund, ART for the World, AFK, the Netherlands Film Fund, and the Greek Film Centre. Rafa’s work is part of a number of institutional and private collections, including those of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Centraal Museum, Utrecht; the Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar; Fondazione In Between Art Film; and the Dommering Foundation, Amsterdam.

The work explores the material and metaphorical architectures of the exploitation of both non-human and human bodies, and offers a meditation on the tension between life and death, survival and sacrifice. Set in a meat refrigeration facility, it encompasses the system of machinery and rooms used for transport, cut, package and storage, all immersed in a saturated artificial glow that heightens the uncanny atmosphere. A sequence of linked allegorical scenes, where actions settle into static or minimally choreographed tableaux, imply the violent oppression of the many by the few, whose level of awareness for their responsibilities remains ambiguous. In these spaces, trained bodies reveal themselves as contiguous with carcasses, the nourishing role of milk with depletion, and a feverish dance with slaughter, generating an overwhelmingly cumulative effect that seeks release. Visually, the work reframes a lineage that resonates with various iconographies of killing and sacrifice, but also with the visceral painterly languages of Chaïm Soutine and Francis Bacon, where flesh becomes a symbolic surface through which mortality, fragility and exposure are rendered visible, and yet the non- human body remains absent. The dense, low-frequency undercurrent of industrial noise is mixed with a disquieting lyrical chorus repeating pledges of subjugation, suggesting the convergence of love and extraction. The continuous long take gives way to a territory that reflects the structures of consciousness in which the visible and the repressed coexist. As such, fragments of bodies not only signal the industrial dismembering of lives and identities into commodities, but also mirror the psychological process of differentiation and exclusion that is required to support such an apparatus. Within this framework, sensations emerge as possible grounds for empathy across species boundaries, while the systems through which bodies are consumed, disciplined and sacrificed are rendered perceptible. The work engages with the cultural and economic institutions that sustain those structures, exposing how they are made to appear distant, normalised and ethically detached.