Zara Julius
CONTAINERS FOR GRIEF

Friday November 10, 2023
sonic lecture starts 7:30 pm
bar opens 7 pm

“Containers for Grief” is a sonic lecture that explores Zara’s working methodology of “rapture”, and the ways it takes seriously a funerary logic around our responsibilities of grief and interment, and by extension considers the possibilities of both repair and revolt in relation to the politics of death and dying in settler (post)colonies, and their respective sound archives in both the popular sphere, and those stored in ethnographic museum contexts. The performance engages the ’sound object’ and indeed the archive on its own terms, and addresses the narratives, embodied experiences and land-based / oceanic networks of loss and life / death and living related to the colonial extraction and dispossession in the Majority World.

Zara Julius is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and cultural worker based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is also the founder of Pan-African creative research and cultural storytelling agency, KONJO. Her practice is informed by a working methodology of ‘rapture’, and is concerned with the relationship between performativity, frequency, concealment and fugitivity in the settler (post) colony, with a special focus on what we call the ‘Global South’. Working with sound, video, performance and image-based installation, Zara Julius’ practice involves the collection, selection, collage and creation of 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 might help us imagine new futures, and experience different present(s) in the face of various unfreedoms, as well as thinking through the carceral logics of the “ethnographic museum” and reimagining new lives for the material housed in these archives.

Zara holds a BA Hons in social anthropology from the University of Cape Town (2014) and a MAFA in Fine Art by Research and Practice from the University of the Witwatersrand (2021). Zara has exhibited her work across South Africa and internationally, including Simone Leigh’s ‘Loophole of Retreat Venice’ (2022). She has been awarded artist residencies in Colombia, Denmark, Austria, South Africa, and most recently she was a guest resident at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in the Netherlands. Zara is currently a researcher and artist in residence as part of the Pressing Matter project at the National Museum of World Cultures (Netherlands) and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Her debut solo exhibition is currently on show at the Weltmuseum Wien April 2023 – April 2024.