artist | researcher
installation, sound & archive

photo by Paul Shiakallis

Zara Julius (b. 1992) is a transdisciplinary artist and creative researcher based in Johannesburg, who engages art-making not solely as material output, but as process and world-thinking. She works primarily with sound and multimedia installation, performance, print and social practice; often collaborating with musicians, cultural workers and educators.

Growing up in Johannesburg, Zara was deeply moved by the way African syncretic churches transformed the inner city; turning ordinary streets and buildings into sacred space through song, prayer, ritual, and performance. That early experience continues to shape her work.

Zara’s practice asks how we might take seriously Black cultural innovation, spirituality, and performativity as sites of possibility in contexts of enduring unfreedoms and extractivist logics. Her practice moves between research and performance, archive and improvisation, scholarship and sound — always asking how we might gather, remember, and imagine otherwise together through collective, embodied effervescence, or what she theorises as ‘rapture’.

She works with materials from colonial archives, liberation histories, and personal memory, carefully reworking them through processes of collecting, cutting, layering, and reassembling so that we can feel the past differently. She is especially engaged in thinking through the archive, dramaturgy, the death-life matrix, and the internal workings of the Black sonic, and how they may help us reconstitute Time, memory and affect in the face of catastrophe.

Zara has exhibited widely, including at Javett Art Centre UP (Pretoria), Akademie der Künste (Berlin), Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam), Wereldmuseum (Amsterdam) and Darat al Funun (Amman). Her debut solo exhibition, Whatever You Throw at the Sea... (Weltmuseum, Vienna, 2023–2024), included a limited-edition vinyl release of the same title. Zara is frequently invited to speak about her practice, including at Simone Leigh’s ‘Loophole of Retreat, Venice’ (2022), Skånes konstförening, Malmö (2022), Belvedere 21, Vienna (2022), and PARSE Artistic Research Conference (2023).

Zara holds a BAHons in social anthropology and a MAFA in Fine Art by research and practice. Her training also includes a Documentary Film intensive at EICTV, Cuba (2015) with Enrique Colina, and the Women Opera Makers workshop at Académie du Festival d’Aix, France (2025) with renowned opera director, Katie Mitchell. She has been awarded artist residencies across multiple countries.

Zara has extensive experience working with, and developing work from various archival collections, including the Old Courthouse Museum, Durban, the Phonogrammarchiv, Vienna, Weltmuseum Vienna, the UWC Robben Island Mayibuye Archives, Cape Town, the Wereldmuseums, Amsterdam and Leiden, Gallo Records archives, and over 40 vernacular / popular collections.

Zara recently released an art book project, A Funeral For… (2025), engaging the archival collections at Wereldmuseums Netherlands, and is currently seeking support for her first work for stage from this research.

Zara’s work has been published by Kunstmagazin PARNASS, PARSE, HERRI, Mail & Guardian, ArtThrob, Springerin, ellipses Journal for Creative Research and the Funambulist. She has an essay on her rapture methodology in Thinking from Black: A Lexicon, an upcoming anthology edited by Tina Campt, due to be published in August 2026 by Alchemy by Knopf Canada.