We Have Arrived covers over a century and a half of achievements, discussing everything from the 19th - century efforts that marked the museum’s inception to its very latest acquisitions. Notably, curators have not limited their sights to iconic artefacts: a majority of the more then a hundred items on display here have never before seen the world outside museum storage. For the purposes of the exhibition, these forgotten pieces take up positions among the museum’s most popular attractions in a probing revelation of the institution’s past and present.

Covering vast geographic distances and several centuries of time, We Have Arrived at once gives a sense of the value, diversity, and structure of the institution’s collections. In accordance with the 21st-century concept of a museum, the institution’s internationally prestigious holdings regard everyday objects and elegant showpieces in equal rank.

Over the past few decades, programmes at the Museum of Ethnography have dedicated considerable thought to the collection and its artefacts, with the result that research has now explored the often-
fragmentary stories of a majority of its objects. In We Have Arrived, these pursuits are on full display in a selection and description process reflecting the interests, viewpoints, and individual voices of thirty different institutional ethnographers. The exhibition takes the perspective that each object has its own story and curatorial background within the multitude of contexts - ethnography, cultural anthropology, archaeology, and the histories of art, society, industry, and technology - inhabited by the professionals who study it.