Zas Ieluhee

Zas Ieluhee, a Cameroonian artist from Douala, draws on her Bamiléké and Tikar heritage to nourish her artistic practice. Her artist name, meaning “the moon” in Medu Neter, reflects her deep connection to ancestral spiritualities and her commitment to decolonizing the imagination.

A self-taught artist, Zas merges art and research to explore the memefication of Black people and the fragmentation of memes, particularly within the context of memetic warfare—an insidious process in which concepts are mutated to colonize consciousness.

She takes inspiration from physical sciences, precolonial spiritualities, and memetics to popularize both ancestral and scientific knowledge. Her visual language, developed during a collaboration with the UNHCR in 2020, has since become central to her practice, featuring in her writing, illustrations, and standalone works—most notably the Abstraction series.

Her scholarly publication Light Work: Black Memes’ Life Cycles and Fragmentation, published in The Critical Meme Reader III, established her as a pioneer in meme studies. In 2024, she was invited to the prestigious Black Artists Retreat, initiated by Theaster Gates and supported by LUMA Arles, where she presented her poem Expressing Myself.

Zas is currently finalizing Ga Yanga, a short film blending poetry, everyday African life, and post-apocalyptic 3D visions, while continuing her research in memetics.