In the collection of the Museum of Ethnography are united more than two hundred thousand individual artefacts, along with several hundred thousand photographs, drawings, manuscripts, audio recordings and films. Here, in the ZOOM exhibition space, this monumental body of material appears in its primordial state, the cast out flotsam of a museal Big Bang. When completed, the institution’s new permanent exhibition will seek to provide insight into how such chaos gives way to order—how a ‘museumgalaxy’ coalesces as a result of systematisation and interpretation.

To fulfil this purpose, it will traverse various historical points of view, examining each problem from multiple angles and pointing out as it goes all the new and exciting possibilities each change in perspectives - and each contemporary interpretation - has to offer. ZOOM, on the other hand, presents both the museum’s hoard of material - and select objects within it - via a more playful approach, without interpretation or textual explanations: it is itself a change in perspectives.

Here, viewpoint and approach become physical experience as we zoom in, turn things over, break them apart, turn them in-side-out, stir them together - and visitors, for their part, lose themselves in a soup of objects, images, and script until they emerge at a few select examples, perhaps even see themselves in ZOOM’s sea of faces. The possibilities opened up by changing perspectives - by zooming in and out - are probed primarily through pairs of opposing concepts: many/few, small/large, part/whole, near/far, up/down, flat/multidimensional, positive/negative, black-and-white/colour, wide-angle/ zoom, acceleration/deceleration, assembly/disassembly, extraction/ incorporation, static /dynamic, ordered/disordered. It is these that hold ZOOM’s varied themes together and these that reach beyond them, imparting coherence to the seemingly incoherent, putting distance between things that otherwise stand side-by-side. Where there is no sequentiality, there is no set starting point. Hurry through or browse slowly, see it all or pick and choose, dive in or skim it over, stand back or peer closely, loom over or hunker down...