To Where Are We Beautifully Going? | Vol. IV: Zara Julius

Performative Lecture & Listening Session
Saturday October 15, 16.00 to 18.00


To Where Are We Beautifully Going?

To take off, to release oneself into flight, what is required? Is it conviction or a beautiful loss of control? Embarking from literary moments of flight, “I got my things and left.” (Dambudzo Marechera, ​House of Hunger​) and “Then I buckled up my shoes, and I started.” (James Baldwin, Go Tell it on The Mountain​), ​To Where Are We Beautifully Going? invites the audience on a sensory journey over vast temporalities and spatialities through the work of artists, writers, curators and thinkers.

In this fourth volume of the series we are proud to host Zara Julius, a Johannesburg-based artist, researcher and vinyl selector. Her work is concerned with the relationship between aesthetics, frequency, concealment and fugitivity in the settler (post) colony. She often spends time examining rituals and strategies of survival, especially the power of rapture. At Skånes konstförening she will hold an immersive performative lecture, Archives & Refusal, and guide us through a listening session.

The lecture will present some visual-sonic fragments that explore Zara’s unfolding methodology of working with archives and refusal as a framework to listen to Black performativity, with special attention to South African musicians who were exiled in Scandinavia during apartheid.

Zara Julius is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and vinyl selector based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is also the founder of Pan-African creative research and cultural storytelling agency, KONJO. Her work is concerned with the relationship between aesthetics, frequency, concealment and fugitivity in the settler (post) colony. Working with sound, video, performance and objects, Zara Julius’ practice involves the collection, selection, collage and creation of archives (real, imagined and embodied) through extensive research projects. She holds a BAHons in social anthropology from the University of Cape Town and an MA in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand.

About the series
To Where Are We Beautifully Going? is a series of performative talks, lectures, film screenings, interventions that invite the audience to experience a plurality of visuality, practice and thought. In these times we are in, of rampant uncertainty, negated history and a sense of tipping chaos it is crucial to forge kinships that traverse borders creating a stronger sense of connection.

Organised and curated by Tawanda Appiah in collaboration with Skånes konstförening.

Tawanda Appiah is a Zimbabwean independent curator, writer and researcher based in Malmo, Sweden.

The event will be held in English. The series is made possible by support from the Swedish Arts Council.

Image credit: Still of Abdullah Ibrahim from “A Brother with Perfect Timing” (1987) by Chris Austin.