Janina Green
(b. 1944, Essen, Germany. Lives and works in Melbourne)

Janina Green began her experimental photographic practice in the 1980s. Her work makes observations about domesticity, motherhood, reading, teaching, sexual politics, theory and psychology. Born in Germany and migrating to Gippsland, Victoria, in 1949, she spent her childhood in the small country town of Yallourn North. Her early years spent in this rural-industrial setting greatly influenced the artist’s understanding of identity as a fluid and dynamic concept, which is powerfully conveyed in her work.

Recent years have seen Green cutting and layering photographs and images from her archive, as well as creating new images. For Melbourne Now, she presents a selection of photos from her ongoing series Studio Games, 2022, a playful collection of works born out of experimentation in the artist’s studio, with each photo-collage ‘draped’ with curtains that frame the scene. Untitled (Fish story), 2021–22, appropriates an image of women working in a factory, a homage to the late American photographer Allan Sekula’s seminal work Fish story, 1995. Untitled (Mop), 2022, depicts an abandoned scene in the artist’s studio complex, with a lone domestic motif of a mop, while Untitled (Draped skull), 2022, is an evocative studio scene with a Baroque-style display of drapes. Together, the works build on the artist’s feminist practice, which explores the craft and processes involved in making photographs, in particular ideas of female labour and the representation of women in photomedia.

Green studied printmaking at RMIT University and fine arts at the University of Melbourne, and discovered a passion for photography when she began a career in art teaching. She has exhibited extensively, including a survey exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in 2016. Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia, Monash Gallery of Art and a number of regional galleries. She is represented by M.33, Melbourne.