Janis Rafa Cracks the Whip

Opposite the back entrance of the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMΣT) is a small sex shop, its black and gold sign depicting the silhouette of a naked woman on her knees, back arched. After visiting Janis Rafa’s ‘We Betrayed the Horses’ – an exhibition which uses the visual iconography of BDSM to explore human exploitation of horses – I walked across the street and went into the shop. I asked the middle-aged man behind the counter if they had any ‘bits’, but he didn’t seem to recognize the word, so I took out my phone and showed him a blurry snapshot of Rafa’s assemblage of found objects, Erected Bridles, Reins, Whips and Mouth-bits (all works 2025), zooming in on the thin bar of metal that sits over the horse’s tongue. ‘No,’ he finally answered. ‘We only have ball gags.’

A brief internet search confirms that you can buy bits for human mouths, but the customer for such hardcore accoutrements probably isn’t the same as your average sex-shop visitor. There’s a tameness to the stock here: a flaccid pleather riding crop, flimsy handcuffs, a PVC-coated ball gag. These are items which would shock only the uninitiated – a superficial vision of BDSM formed in the mind of an outsider who wants to spice up their sex life, but only a little. I get the same feeling looking at Rafa’s work: although the artist employs the visual language of BDSM, she intentionally caricatures such practices, reducing them to simple memes. Whips and restraints abound; a hot-pink neon sign reads your genitals rubbing my back / your hands whipping my butt / your heels spurring my ribs / your glories killing my needs. Many of the works in the exhibition’s first room are designed as a sort of pun: the language and equipment used for horse riding also happens to apply to sexual domination. The link Rafa draws between these two practices is sly and playful. But, behind the surface layer of shock and humour, a darker image – of the violent means humans employ to tame horses – emerges. 

In the corridor between the exhibition’s two rooms hangs a curtain of sorts. This Horse Was more than a Good Ride is made from 2.9 kilograms of horse tails, with visitors forced to walk through it, the coarse hair brushing against their faces. The work serves as an effective physical reminder of the horses exploited in equestrian sports – an effect compounded by another neon sign seen immediately after passing through the curtain, which lists statistics relating to the career of racehorse Vyta Du Roc: ‘7 wins, 27 races / £176,514 profit / Nose bleeding in race / Slaughtered for meat’ (Cause of Death #1). Yet, when I later asked Rafa how she had sourced the tails used to make This Horse Was more than a Good Ride, she hesitated to answer. Although she had asked questions of her suppliers via email, the artist couldn’t guarantee that the hair had not come from slaughtered horses. Even in the best-case scenario, the animals were farmed and had their tails harvested at regular intervals – a practice which feels at odds with the ethical concerns of the show.  

Paradoxically, the strongest works in ‘We Betrayed the Horses’ are those where the tension between violence and humour is greatest: we might laugh at the on-the-nose punning of a title like Whipping Butts & Riding History, but the show’s comedy is swiftly curtailed by the brutality underpinning it. Surrounded by works that simmer with the threat of exploitation, Rafa seems to be asking: Why are you able to laugh at all?

Part of the ‘Why Look at Animals?’ programme, Janis Rafa’s ‘We Betrayed the Horses’ is on view at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, until 5 October

_{Main image: Janis Rafa, Water-bowls for Mouth Contentment, 2023, automatic water dispensers, iron, copper, dimension variable. Courtesy: the artist}