The Museum’s Politics of Space and Colonial Framing of Indigenous Art The Claire and Marc Bourgie Pavilion’s Inuit Art Exhibition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines museums’ spatial politics in the representation of Indigenous art history questioning the affects and effects of architecture on visitors’ experience and interpretation of museum narratives. The body of research my analysis draws from focuses primarily on theories of space and spatial organization, architecture, and design, as well as histories of settler colonialism and the racialization of bodies and knowledge through modes of rationalization. Looking carefully at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Claire and Marc Bourgie Pavilion, I attend to the ways in which the collection of Inuit art housed on the fourth-floor galleria is made inconsequential and how the space enacts a disservice to the artworks and artists presented, supporting national colonial imaginaries anchored in settler colonialism. My inquiry is first and foremost informed by a decolonial theoretical framework. This thesis attempts at decolonizing my own knowledge and asking how and if the Inuit art collection on the last floor of the Claire and Marc Bourgie pavilion allows for decolonizing knowledge. I contend that experiences of this space speak to bigger and more complex issues of representation and decolonization in cultural institutions and respond to larger discourses critical of institutional and socio-political realities. Accordingly, I recognize the dual relationship between museum institutions—their physical spaces and the objects displayed—and the visitors, along with the active role of each in making sense of what is being presented, constructing, and organizing knowledge. I question the information and insights offered by the materials and objects and the relationships they facilitate. In sum, I ask: what knowledge is made available? How does this knowledge relate to the lived realities and the histories of the cultures put on display?
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.020 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
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".