Exhibition Research: Let Textiles Talk

The tapestries IRL

by Amanda Pinatih

Museum opened again

In June of last year, the museum and the depot opened again after being in lockdown for several months due to Covid-19. I directly took the chance to go and see the tapestries in person. They were taken out of the storage room and were waiting for me in the multifunctional atelier, a place where we can study museum objects.

Together with the restorers we looked at the state of the tapestries. Because they hadn’t been shown for a while, they had to uncrease a little, but overall, they looked stunning. Some were a bit wobbly, but that’s the way they’re woven, others had some loose threads, yet that was easily repaired. A couple had their metal custom tags still on which caused some small rust stains. We could clean those but for me these small imperfections tell a story, a narration of how they used to travel; from Egypt to the Netherlands, from the Netherlands to Norway and back to be stored away in the depot. So, in the end, we decided to only fix the tapestries to make them “exhibition proof” without bringing any aesthetic changes to the pieces.