Zara Julius

Zara Julius is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and cultural worker based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her practice is informed by a working methodology of ‘rapture’; asking how we might take seriously Black cultural innovation, fugitivity and performativity as sites of possibility in contexts of enduring settler-colonial logics and landlessness in the Global South. Her practice involves the collection, selection, and creation of (contested) archives (real, imagined and embodied) through extensive research projects. She is especially engaged in thinking through the internal workings of the Black sonic, and how they may help us reconstitute Time, memory, affect and archive in the face of various unfreedoms.

Her work has been shown at the Weltmuseum Wien in Austria in 2023, Javett Art Centre in South Africa in 2022, and Sound Art Lab in Denmark in 2022, among others. Alongside exhibitions, Julius has developed curatorial and research projects such as Rapture Institute, South-Africa in 2019, Proclamation 73 in 2018, and KONJO and Talking Drum podcast that remain ongoing since 2017.