Zara Julius

Unveiling the frequently misappropriated histories of Black life, Zara Julius looks upon the vast palimpsest of the past to untangle the ingenuity of the dispossessed. The Johannesburg artist draws upon archival recordings and histories of the devotional traditions of African syncretic churches, cutting and recombining these materials until their intimacies reemerge with new force. Julius calls one of her central preoccupations rapture: a collective and embodied effervescence to imagine alternative worlds and transcend the strictures of their historical circumstances, however briefly. Sound becomes remembrance and reconstitution; complexities are restored to voices flattened by colonial archives, fragments consigned to cultural oblivion brought into the light. The eloquence of these fragments is teased forth into new constellations of meaning, from a repository of fixed historical verdicts into a seance where the living and the dead may converse anew.