“Oy vey” is a shortened form of the Yiddish phrase “Oy vey is mir”. It translates to “Oh, woe is me” and should be yelled at the heavens or whispered to oneself, says visual artist Joe Turpin. It’s a playful and fitting emotional reaction to life in the pandemic.

Joe Turpin is a visual artist who focuses on historically charged narratives and semiotics, and the physical expansion of painting as practice. He makes mixed media installations and is drawn to temporal conversations about memory and history, where his identity as a Jewish person becomes principal and consequential to exploring memory, identity, migration, persecution and cultural paradigms.

Turpin holds an honours degree in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand and master’s degree from Pratt Institute in New York.