Striking Roots - An Exhibition by Joe Turpin
“That they could ‘contribute to the development movements and … earn a civic and national status other than that of coloniser, external outsider,’ the ‘foreign’ plants mutate and strike roots.” – Nadine Gordimer.
This quote by the late South African writer and Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer refers to those white, mainly Jewish, South Africans who joined the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Such a metaphor also applies to Simon Zukas, who was one of the few white people to join Zambia’s liberation campaign and fight against British colonisation and white settler federation. Many of these brave people paid with their extensive time in prison, in exile, and even with their lives, for a cause greater than their own.
These political figures and their actions formed the point of departure to Joe Turpin’s research and multidisciplinary art practice, informed by the anti-colonial position in Africa, both past and contemporary. Is there a white position in fighting colonialism, and furthermore, is there an anti-colonial Jewish position as well? How have such figures, who have demonstrated this radical empathy with the colonised masses in our recent histories, been memorialised? These questions posed the thematic concerns that Turpin grappled with during his residency with the Lusaka Contemporary Art Centre.
Striking Roots (2024) is the culmination of this work, and is presented as a multi-disciplinary exhibition comprising of paintings, drawings, video, sculpture, performance and installation, which address the aforementioned political and historical wanderings in a visual representation, that ultimately seeks to determine a greater understanding of Turpin’s own identity, and sense of belonging on the African continent.
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 holds an MFA from the Pratt Institute in New York (2023) and BA in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
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. He lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
