Zara Julius is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Johannesburg. Working primarily with sound, multimedia installation, print, and social practice, she often collaborates with musicians, cultural workers, and educators. Her practice is guided by a methodology she terms “rapture,” which explores how Black cultural innovation, fugitivity, and performativity can serve as sites of possibility within enduring extractivist logics and catastrophe.

Her work centres on the collection, selection, and creation of (contested) archives—real, imagined, and embodied—through extensive research. She engages deeply with the archive, the death-life matrix, and the internal workings of the Black sonic, asking how these can help reconstitute Time, memory, affect, and History amid ongoing unfreedoms and landlessness. Zara recently released an art book project, A Funeral For…, developed from archival material at Wereldmuseums Netherlands, and is currently adapting this research into her first stage work.

Zara has worked with a wide range of archival collections, including the Old Courthouse Museum (Durban), Phonogrammarchiv (Vienna), Weltmuseum (Vienna), the UWC Robben Island Mayibuye Archives (Cape Town), the Wereldmuseum / Tropen Museum (Amsterdam), Gallo Records archives, the Volkenkunde Museum (Leiden), and many vernacular collections. She also collaborated on a publication with the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit.

Zara holds a BAHons in Social Anthropology from the University of Cape Town (2014) and a MAFA in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand (2021). Her training also includes the intermediate Photography course at Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg (2016), a two-month Documentary Film residency with Enrique Colina at Escuela Internacional de Cine y Television (EICTV), Cuba (2015), and the Women Opera Makers workshop with opera and theatre director Katie Mitchell at Académie du Festival d’Aix, France (2025).

Since 2015, Zara has exhibited at local galleries like David Krut and SMAC, and produced installations at Javett Art Centre UP (Pretoria), Akademie der Künste (Berlin), and Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam). 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 perform and speak about her practice, with appearances at Simone Leigh’s Loophole of Retreat Venice (2022), Skånes konstförening (Malmö, 2022), school (Vienna, 2023), and the PARSE Artistic Research Conference (2023). She has developed and produced two podcast series—Talking Drum and Gallo Vault Sessions—exploring intersections of music, history, and politics in the Black world. She also directed the Family Matters film trilogy, commissioned by the Goethe-Institut. Zara is featured in the group exhibition Unfinished Pasts (Wereldmuseum, Amsterdam, 2025–2027), engaging provenance and contemporary debates around restitution of colonial museum archives. Her work has been published in Kunstmagazin PARNASS, PARSE, HERRI, Mail & Guardian, ArtThrob, Springerin, and ellipses: Journal for Creative Research. She has also worked as a content producer and scriptwriter for Bassline’s Africa Day TV special for SABC.

Over the past five years, Zara has collaborated extensively with Black feminist theorist Tina Campt, as they explore methodologies for engaging with visual and sonic culture in the Black world.