gsmdesign so far...

After being at the National Museum of Singapore on Monday, I have since been stationed at the office working on the Malay Heritage Museum project which has been ongoing for the last two years. The Malay Heritage Center is a government-funded space within a listed building and, along with the Indian Heritage Center and Chinese Heritage Center, serve to represent the historical and contemporary multi-culturalism in Singapore.
GsmDesign and GsmCreative have been contracted to curate and design the new permanent exhibition of Malay artifacts from Singapore. The reason the project has taken such an unusually long time to realize is down to the political and social controversies surrounding it. It was these controversies which made the previous permanent exhibition unsuccessful as the narrative of it was argued, by some, as an inaccurate retelling of history. Over the last few years GsmCreative has meticulously studied the history of Malaysia's involvement with Singapore to produce an appropriate and interesting story for the exhibition. One that was respectful to the indigenous Malays without offending others and, more importantly, causing political controversy.
Now that GsmCreated has finalised the storyline (they are just waiting for the official go-ahead), the GsmDesign team must decide upon the physical content to support it i.e. which artifacts will be displayed. There are over 400 of them, of which about half I have been studying and cataloging. This is one of the earliest stages of the design process, one of those jobs which one no one really wants to do but is crucial in making the final selection. I'm required to log images, dimensions and descriptions of the artifacts. I haven't found it too tedious (as I was warned) although it has taken much longer than I first presumed it would.
And at least it's not stressful (how could I be stressed with a fishpond next to my desk?!), the others are working on tight schedules; there are three exhibition openings in 2 weeks!