This conversation with Zara Julius concludes the third season of Sonic Interventions on South African Sound Art. Zara Julius shares about her debut solo exhibition “Whatever You Throw At The Sea” at the Weltmuseum in Vienna critically reflecting about postcolonial structures in museums and archives. She speaks about her editorial work, her research, and her artistic practice.

In Conversation with

Zara Julius (1992) 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. Working with sound, video, performance and image-based installation, her practice involves the collection, selection, collage and creation of archives (real, imagined and embodied) through extensive research projects. Informed by her working methodology of ‘rapture’, Zara Julius 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 intimate and museological archiving practices. Many of Zara’s projects have focused on mapping the sonic and spiritual mobilities of spiritual rapture and rupture with congregants of syncretic traditions, and on (post)apartheid / (post)colonial narratives around race, place and time as. Zara holds a BAHons 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. As a vinyl selector, Zara’s sets reflect her desire to travel land, seas and time. She is currently in residence at the Oscillations project, a cooperation between the Akademie der Künste (Germany) and the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape (South Africa).

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