Since the end of 2025 I have been working with the Powell-Cotton Museum in Kent to build on the museum’s ongoing decolonisation work.
Opening with a private viewing on 17th July 2026, before opening to the public on 18th July 2026, Reframing the Zulu Collection, is a new permanent exhibition, offering a re-interpretation of the museum’s Zulu collection.
The exhibition brings together objects collected by members of the Powell-Cotton family during their visit to Zululand in 1935, alongside the perspectives of contemporary Zulu individuals, who have generously shared their knowledge, family histories and cultural heritage with the project.
The collection has been re-examined not simply as a group of artefacts, but as carriers of knowledge, memory, identity and lived experience. This process has uncovered stories that remained hidden within the collection, including those of the individuals and communities who shared aspects of their culture and daily lives with the museum’s founder and principal collector, Percy Powell-Cotton, and his family.
For many years, museum displays and colonial collecting practices often represented Zulu people, and African cultures more broadly, through narratives rooted in exoticism, primitivism, and cultural hierarchy. Our contribution aims to transform an existing record of colonial encounter into a space for shared knowledge, reflection, and renewed understanding by creating space for dialogue, reinterpretation, and reclamation.
As part of the permanent exhibition within the Powell-Cotton Museum, these new perspectives will remain part of the museum’s story for years to come.
The exhibition also extends beyond the physical space through the Bloomberg Connects digital guide.
Jordan Rowe 