Proclamation 73 GPS-Projekte 2018

​Proclamation 73 is an audio-visual archival project and exhibition by Zara Julius and Chandra Frank in the Durban Art Gallery

In this project, artist Zara Julius and curator/academic Chandra Frank explored the histories of the neighbourhoods in Durban North and Durban South that were designated in the apartheid era as Coloured and Indian group areas. The aim of the project was to work with members of these marginalised communities to create an open-access, public submission visual memory space; and to challenge notions of race and space in Durban, whilst bringing together a curated range of reflections on land, families and racial hierarchies under Apartheid.

Julius and Frank developed relationships with photographers, families, individual community members and students from the neighbourhoods they were focusing on, and in the course of 2018 scanned a large body of photographic works from family albums and photographic collections of community members. Over this period, they used Instagram to publish selected images in order to raise public awareness of the work, as well as to start establishing the open-access memory space they were working towards. They then curated an exhibition of selected images, organized into thematic clusters including “racial identity”, “gender” and “land”. The exhibition opened on 10 December 2018 at the Durban Art Gallery, and was attended by many of the people who had come into contact the project during the research phase, as well as the broader Durban public. The exhibition was on display until 15 February 2019. Panel discussions, curator’s talks and student workshops were presented in the exhibition space over this period.