Then and Now: On Activating Sikh Visual and Material Culture at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A museum’s relevance must lie in its ability to inspire reflections on the works it contains, fostering and cherishing a plurality of interpretations. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has been exploring new avenues of interpretation, rejecting the idea of an exhaustive overview of the arts of the world’s various regions in the manner of the so-called universal museums of the nineteenth century. From the multitude of realities its art collections embody and the histories they index, nodes of encounter and entanglement emerge, the so-called space “in between,” from which new visions arise. Within this new epistemic framework, the museum recently welcomed The Kapany Collection of Sikh Art, a new gallery dedicated to historical and contemporary Sikh Art, part of a commitment to render the museum into a space receptive to the shifting plurality of voices that comprise our ever-changing Canadian society. The Kapany Collection presented a timely opportunity to re-think conventional museological approaches and offer new perspectives to Sikh art and art in general, incorporating Sikhi as a meaningful curatorial praxis and prompting contemporary diasporic artists to weave new histories from within.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".