ZOOM - A Change in Perspectives

Introduction

The collection of the Museum of Ethnography comprises more than two hundred thousand artefacts, accompanied by several hundred thousand archive photographs, drawings, manuscripts, audio recordings, and films. In ZOOM, this monumental body of material appears in its primordial state: the cast-out flotsam of a ‘museal Big Bang’. The contrast with the institution’s new core exhibition is deliberate. While the latter offers insight into how chaos gives way to order – how ‘museum galaxies’ coalesce as a result of systematisation and interpretation – in doing so traversing various historical points of view, examining each problem from multiple angles, and pointing out all the new and exciting possibilities each change in perspectives has to offer; ZOOM, for its part, takes a more playful approach, without interpretation or textual explanations: it is itself a change in perspectives. In the ZOOM exhibition space, the focus is on physical experience: the installation zooms in, flips things over, breaks them apart, turns them in-side-out, and mixes them together. Visitors lose themselves in a soup of objects, images, and words until, at some point, they emerge at a few select examples, perhaps even spot themselves in ZOOM’s sea of faces.

The catalogue is available at the Etknow bookshop of the museum and online.

The ZOOM exhibition catalogue of the Museum of Ethnography wins the second international prize | Museum of Ethnography