Hoerikwaggo
 lmages of Table Mountain

Author and Curator
Nicolaas Vergunst
South African National Gallery -  an lziko Museums of Cape Town project
November 2000 - April 2001 Cape Town

So Geographers in Afric-Maps
With savage Pictures fill their gaps
And o'er uninhabitable Downs
Place Elephants for want of Towns

Jonathan Swift (1667 -1745)
On Poetry: A Rhapsody

 

From a European perspective, there can be little doubt that before Table Mountain was ever sighted or the Cape of Good Hope doubled, and certainly long before the Cape was ever settled, the region, and indeed, the whole continent, was veiled with myth and mystery, dominated by forces of good and evil.

Sam Fuller
Continuity and Change... 1999


Curator's Preface

Traditional European projections of a stereographic Africa reveal how Table Mountain came to symbolize all that is strange and enigmatic to an 'outsider' looking in at the Cape of Good Hope. The iconography of Table Mountain informs this exhibition and its catalogue, and demonstrates how images of the mountain signify changing relations and attitudes toward the Cape over the past five hundred years. The focus is not the mountain's natural features nor the attendant issues of environmental conservation, urban development and eco-tourism, but rather the mountain as the most recurrent icon in South African history.

The formation of Iziko Museums of Cape Town offers an unprecedented opportunity to show diverse images from formerly separate collections, and to reappraise the multiple meanings invested in these images.

I hope our endeavours reveal as much about the society that collects, preserves and displays them, as they do about the mountain itself. But most importantly, we want to show that Table Mountain is a cultural palimpsest - a multi-layered  polyvocal symbol that 'speaks' through various people in different ways with astonishing clarity, variety and diversity.

Nicolaas Vergunst
SA National Gallery 2000
 

Copyright © 2001   iziko museums of cape town