Janis Rafa takes part in the Eye’s digital exhibition

09.03.21

player.eyefilm.nl

To celebrate Eye’s 75th anniversary this year, seven artists were asked by EYE Filmmuseum (Amsterdam) to provide a film work for a digital exhibition. They are all artists with whom EYE Filmmuseum has collaborated over the past ten years in the context of an exhibition. The films are as different as the artists themselves, but they are all situated at the interface between film and visual art, precisely the focus of our exhibition policy.

Waiting for the Time to Pass (Janis Rafa, 2021, 4’30’’) watch the film
A dog waits in a car. The windows fog up and we hear the creature panting and whining softly – his impatience and restlessness are contagious. The dog is entirely at the mercy of people in escaping from this predicament. Janis Rafa connects this image with early Soviet space flights in which dogs were sent into space as part of experiments. Waiting for the Time to Pass is a new work, made during the corona pandemic, and the association with the limited freedom of movement and uncertainty about the lockdown is clear. In her earlier work, Rafa often commented subtly on the ecological disaster caused by anthropocentrism.

Janis Rafa (1984) is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work featured in Eye’s 2016 exhibition Close-Up: A New Generation of Film and Video Artists in the Netherlands. She was artist in residence at Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, and her work has been presented at Paris’ Centre Pompidou, New York’s MoMA and London’s Tate Modern. With her first feature film she won the VEVAM Fund Prize from the Directors Forum and the Prize of the Circle of Dutch Film Journalists.