Stranded Iconographies: The Journeys of Tapestries from Rorke’s Drift, 1965

Abstract

South African institutions were slow to acquire artworks by black women. When they did, among the first were tapestries from a Swedish art center at Rorke’s Drift in rural South Africa. However, it remains unknown that many works by these marginalized African women had entered Swedish collections before then, showing in acclaimed exhibitions such as Woven in Africa, which opened at Röhsska Museum of Design and Craft in Göteborg in 1965. Despite the proportions of this export undertaking, and the valorizing of Sweden in the reinvention of African culture, little is remembered of these “stranded” works or the subjectivities that informed them. The recent showing in 2021–2022 of Röhsska’s Rorke’s Drift tapestries on Migration—The Journey of Objects provides a context for interrogating past curatorial practices related to these works. Revealing how the meanings of these migrating tapestries shifted over time, this article also shows that their vicissitudes were also ordained in the conception of the Rorke’s Drift project. Using a post-development methodology, the author unsettles erstwhile notions of cultural philanthropy, showing how the venture advanced the interests of its planners in Stockholm, and how these problematically-connoted tapestries reflect the hegemonies of both apartheid and mid-century Swedish “development.”