NEW YORK, NY.- In a fast-paced world, asinnajaq likes to take things slow.

As a guest curator at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, asinnajaq, a 32 year-old artist who uses all lowercase letters in her name, has been working on a new exhibition of Inuit art for a few years now; she’s not quite sure how long.

“Time is as meaningless as it ever has been to me,” said asinnajaq, a soft-spoken Inuk from the northern Quebec village Inukjuak, in a video call to discuss the exhibition, “uummaqutik, essence of life,” to open Nov. 8.

Her colleague, Léuli Eshraghi, 38, who is of Samoan and Persian descent and was brought on last year as the 164-year-old museum’s first curator of Indigenous practices, called this intentional slowing down “working at the speed of relationships.”

And relationships are the heart of the change that is happening at the MMFA.

Over the past five years or so, the team there has seen a marked shift in conversation around exhibitions. Questions of cultural appropriation, sensitivity and decolonization have been raised, amid a groundswell of interest from the museum-going public.

It is part of a broader story as museums navigate an identity crisis, grappling with the question of whether they should simply be places that exhibit and research artifacts, or should actively engage with political and social issues.

And they face changing expectations from visitors and their own curators alike, with people concerned about whether existing practices are truly inclusive, or if they are steeped in colonial habits and perspectives that need to change.

With this new exhibition, created by asinnajaq, Eshraghi and Jacques Des Rochers, the museum’s curator of Quebec and Canadian art (before 1945), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has landed on the side of transforming how things are done. But the curators and the museum’s director are hesitant to call what they are doing “decolonizing,” a term that Jean-François Bélisle, the director of the National Gallery of Canada, described in an interview with The New York Times as “very loaded.” The term, particularly in a museum context, means to deconstruct or dismantle colonial ideologies and challenge the assumed superiority of Western thought and approaches.

As asinnajaq explained, “The way that I like to work is, these things I want to, like, combat them, but as gently as possible that, like, maybe you don’t even know that it’s happening. That’s kind of my goal.”

In a sign of its commitment to Indigenous art, the museum is installing the new exhibition in a prominent ground floor space — and scrapping the old Inuit art gallery, which sat in a dark corner on the fourth floor of another building. At more than 2,000 square feet, the new location more than doubles the space allocated to Inuit art.

In the course of their work, asinnajaq and Eshraghi have been examining the language around the exhibit (wall texts, labels, work titles) while also monitoring the pace of the exhibit’s creation to ensure the Inuit community, their views and their way of life are respectfully placed front and center.

Now, said the museum’s director, Stéphane Aquin, the power of telling stories is squarely in the hands of “those who the museum has not heard or listened to properly.”

“I think consideration, real consideration, respect and attention is given to these artists,” said Aquin, of the way that curators at major museums in the United States and Canada are looking at Indigenous art. “It’s a great time, I think, for Native artists, Inuit artists, First Nations’ artists, as the institutions are at last paying attention.”

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was an early mover in recognizing Inuit artists. Since starting its collection in the early 1950s, it has amassed the work of nearly 300 artists from territories across Alaska, Canada and Greenland, including prints, textiles, photographs, paintings, sculptures and installations.

Some 60 of these works, all by contemporary Inuit artists, will be shown in “uummaqutik, essence of life.” Another 60, including new acquisitions, will be rotated in over the next five years.

The museum has allocated some 12% of its budget, 130,000 Canadian dollars (around $96,000), per year toward growing its Indigenous art collection, said Aquin via email, adding 131 works in the past five years focusing on local and international artists and “enhancing voices that remain underrepresented.”

In addition to working with asinnajaq and Eshraghi, the museum is collaborating with five Inuit advisers, and has invited members of the Southern Quebec Inuit Association to come in and help select items from the museum’s permanent collection to go in a community display case.

“Many museum collections across Canada and the northern U.S. have Inuit art, but they don’t necessarily have a direct relationship with living Inuit communities who are able to interpret in their own way,” Eshraghi added.

Most of the narratives about the Inuit by non-Inuks have a core of truth, asinnajaq said. People and exhibitions in the past have often focused on things like shamanism, mysticism and transformation. She noted that while these are part of the culture, sometimes the way they have been addressed has felt like “exotification,” leaving her feeling alienated.

Those feelings have informed her goal now: to make sure the revamped permanent exhibition is a home away from home for Inuks, as well as a place where others can get a deeper sense of Inuit practices. Montreal is a hub for Inuit communities, particularly from Nunavik and Nunatsiavut, whose people often visit the city to access medical care and other resources.

The museum is also working to build relationships with Inuit communities, artists and curators through the Inuit Futures in Arts Leadership, an outside mentorship program started by art historian Heather Igloliorte, an Inuk from Newfoundland.

The conversations taking place with the Inuit community and staff members have resulted in a variety of decisions, including the wall paint color (a pale, peachy pink, reminiscent of sunset and sunrise reflected on snow, and an antidote to the idea that the circumpolar regions are cold, blue and devoid of life), the addition of benches (to prioritize spaces where people can take a break and rest), and free access for people of Inuit heritage (no proof needed). The conversations also inspired the idea of bringing in an Inuk drummer to prepare the space before the exhibition opens, to refresh the energy in the room.

“Drumming connects us with our hearts, and I think hearing the sound echoing off of the walls lets you understand the space in another way as well,” asinnajaq said.

She added that taking care of the space is “like caring for everyone that will come visit.”

Exhibition visitors will be introduced to works like those by Niap, a 37-year-old Inuk artist who grew up in northern Quebec.

Her installation “Katajjausivallaat, the Cradled Rhythm” attempts to give physical form to throat singing, or katajjaniq. Three 30-pound stone carvings float above pedestals in a dark room, each paired with three-minute soundscapes that imitate the sounds of wind, river and dog sled.

Katajjaniq was the first form of so-called intangible heritage to be recognized by the government of Quebec. “I thought that was kind of funny,” Niap said, in a video call, adding that it led her to think, “‘What would it look like if it was tangible?’”

For Niap, her works are an expression of her connection with Inuit culture, and a reclamation of her background. It is a chance to counter the forced assimilation of generations of Inuit children at Canada’s residential school programs.

Also on display will be a series of ink portraits of her mother and grandmother, titled “Beauty in Our Lines,” onto which Niap sewed traditional Inuit face and body tattoos, tunniq and kakiniq, with thread. The practice, which marks different stages of an Inuk woman’s life, was banned by the Catholic Church for years.

The demonizing of Inuit ways of living — the throat singing, hunting, language — “created shame,” Niap said. “And it’s intergenerational, this loss of identity that we have, it created a lot of chaos in our people.”

There were also the movements promoting Inuit art as a commercial enterprise, meant to lift communities out of poverty, but which ended up limiting some artists’ expression.

“You know, white settlers saw that, ‘Oh, you could sell that, people buy that,’” Niap said. “And then they would say: ‘Oh, don’t do this. Don’t do that. Don’t make this. Don’t make that, make this instead.’”

Contemporary artists, she added, are now remaking their identity in “all our different ways.”

But not every Indigenous artist is out to make a statement.

“If you just want to live your life and do your own thing, you know, it’s not your job to educate people, then also power to you,” said Jessica Winters, 28, an Inuk artist from Makkovik, a town in Labrador. “That’s where I’m at right now.”

Her paintings of lichen on show are an encapsulation of the feeling she gets when she is home in Labrador, she said.

“You kind of get sucked in by, like, the intricacy of the lichen and how there’s so much life even just on the rocks,” she said. “It feels like the land is breathing, almost like it’s this insane euphoric experience that I sometimes have.”

The concept of the exhibition, which will include works showing Inuit artists’ views on childbirth, child rearing and everyday activities, as well as reflections on nonhuman elements like animals, plants, stones and stars, is about “making space to think about what our life is composed of, what makes our life possible,” asinnajaq said.

“Hopefully taking this and, like, changing ourselves, transforming what we’re seeing into new energy,” she added.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.