‘Eish’ is a South African slang term used to show frustration or annoyance with, or respond to, an unforeseen circumstance. The artist says: “I grew up saying “eish”, learning it at public school. With each colour of the letters and exclamation marks being those of the flag of South Africa, this work is a playful attempt at interpreting the everyday realities in our country that may be different from the promises of a post-1994 South African democratic nation state.

“As an artist I am asking, ‘What has been successful? What has been frustrating? How fictitious is the idea of a free, fair, equal society when many people’s lived reality does not reflect the idealisms of the new South Africa’s constitutional genesis in the 1990s? I want the viewer to ask themselves, ‘What has made you say eish lately?’” (Coincidentally ‘eish’ is also Hebrew for the word ‘fire’).

Joe Turpin is a South African visual artist whose research practice focuses on historically charged narratives and semiotics as expansions of painting.

Turpin grounds mixed-media installations in painting to create temporal conversations about identity, memory and history. His Jewish heritage becomes principal and consequential in exploring stories of diaspora, migration and persecution. These cultural paradigms inform his archival research and artistic production.

Turpin holds an MFA from Pratt Institute, New York (2023) where he majored in painting and drawing, and a BA in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand (2019). He was a 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.