For Between Memory and the Material, Murray James Turpin returns to an archive of magazines he collected over almost 20 years. Filled with art, fashion, music, design and popular culture, they capture a period when South Africa was changing quickly and printed media still played a major role in shaping how people saw the world.
Turpin collected the magazines between 2002 and 2020. They span the years of South Africa’s young democracy, growing globalisation and the gradual shift towards digital media. Now, he cuts into those pages and uses them to make collages, reducing busy layouts and familiar images into simpler compositions.
His process is one of editing. Photographs, text and colour are cut apart, rearranged and stripped back. What remains might be a face, a shape, a line of type or a small section of an image. Removed from its original context, each fragment starts to suggest something different.
The work developed further through Turpin’s collaboration with Sbongiseni Khulu at the David Krut Workshop. The collages were translated into pronto plate prints, turning cut paper into printed lines and textures. Monotype adds variation from one impression to the next, while spray paint introduces a looser, more immediate element. Gold leaf is used selectively, drawing attention to certain fragments and giving them a new sense of value.
The materials are important to the exhibition. Cutting, printing, spraying and layering all depend on working directly with the image by hand. At a time when so much visual culture is seen quickly on screens, Turpin slows the process down and returns to the physical act of looking, selecting and making.
Between Memory and the Material takes images that were once current and widely circulated and gives them another life. Turpin works with what has survived in print, allowing old photographs, advertisements and graphic fragments to carry new meanings once they are removed from the pages where they first appeared.
