HomeBlogArtist TalksArtist Talk with Joe Turpin

Artist Talk with Joe Turpin

August 26, 2024
Artist Talks
Joe Turpin our artist-in-residence at the Lusaka Contemporary Art Centre from July to August 2024, discussed his project: Researching the Jewish Community in Relation to Colonialism in Zambia on Saturday, August 3, 2024.
 
Having been born only a year after South Africa’s first democratic elections, Turpin grew up with an awareness of apartheid and the complexity of whiteness in post-colonial Africa and the binary categorisation of black and white by the colonial system. As an artist, he is interested in history and politics, and part of decolonising politics entails embracing his Jewish cultural heritage and understanding that the differences between the white paradigm, hence his artistic research on whiteness that is anti-colonial in Africa. 
 
During the talk, Turpin discussed Jewish figures involved in liberation movements across Africa, including his artistic research during his residency at LuCAC focused on Simon Zukas, one of Zambia’s Independence heroes and politician of Jewish origin.
 
Turpin emphasized that his exploration of the varied stories of Jewish communities and or personalities in Africa, particularly in the context of liberation movements or colonialism is a way to understand his identity and find his position as well as a sense of belonging on the African continent. 
 
He maintained that artists should be free to make whatever art they want – political or otherwise. But choosing not to make art political is a political act in itself. “Throughout time, artists have depicted history, and I think artists should keep challenging history and challenging politics,” he said.
 

Joe Turpin (b.1995 in Johannesburg) is a South African visual artist whose research practice focuses on historically charged narratives and semiotics as expansions of painting. Joe makes mixed-media installations grounded in painting that create temporal conversations about identity, memory, and history. His Jewish heritage becomes principal and consequential in exploring stories of migration and persecution.  These cultural paradigms inform his archival research and artistic production.


Turpin graduated from the Pratt Institute in New York in 2023 with an MFA in Painting & Drawing, and from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 2018 with a BA in Fine Art. Joe Turpin was a Top 3 finalist in the 2019 Cassirer Welz Award and a 2022 recipient of the Stutzman Foundation First Year MFA Fine Arts Awards for Three-Dimensional Art