Dream Inheritances

An exploration of mixed-race identities, cultural belonging and shared histories across Wales and Ireland.

Dream Inheritances brings into dialogue the practices of Cardiff-based artist Sophie Mak-Schram and Dublin-based artist Alice Rekab. Exploring histories of migration and belonging, together they reflect on how personal and historical narratives of colonisation, contested languages and diasporic communities intertwine. 

Taking "No Blacks No Dogs No Irish” – a sign commonly seen near ports, including Cardiff Docks – as a starting point, the exhibition asks: what legacies of exclusion have we inherited, and what futures can we imagine from them? How can mixedness be a site of potential to refigure histories and prefigure futures?

The exhibition includes new paintings, sculptures and wall works, including collaborative pieces made together and in conversation with Riverside Warehouse Youth Club. A living room, comprised partially of furniture reminiscent of, or on loan from, Rekab and Mak-Schram’s grandparents invites you to rest inside a different space of belonging.

Alongside this, Rekab and Mak-Schram have invited two Global Majority artists to contribute works, and worked with two Young Producers from Riverside on an events programme to accompany the exhibition.

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About the artists

Sophie Mak-Schram is an artist whose practice spans artistic research, radical pedagogies and collaborative, place-specific work around power, collectivity, knowledges and futures. Sophie works with others to create sites of collective learning, prefigure forms of belonging and imagine new kinships. This work is informed by personal and shared experiences of cultural difference, coloniality, race and gender.

Often using the metaphor of the ‘tool’ - as a poetic and practical object –they work with collaborators to make tools that can shift power, gather groups and offer ways of being in relation (to each other, to place, to institutions) differently. A tool might be an access rider, a radical safeguarding protocol or a collectively written welcome text, or it might be a ceramic you can touch in the context of a look-don’t-touch museum, a megaphone or a surreal cushion.

Recent projects include To Shift a Stone (2025-2026), commissioned by Amgueddfa Cymru and Chapter Arts Centre and Stretching Thresholds, Holding Streams (2024-2025) in collaboration with Jeanne van Heeswijk, commissioned by Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Switzerland. Their first monograph, Pedagogies of the Art-Proximate, will be published by Robida in late 2026.

Alice Rekab is an artist and educator based in Dublin. In their work Rekab explores embedded personal and cultural narratives; the stories that we tell and the stories that we are told about ourselves. This work emerges from their own mixed-race Irish identity, their family history, experiences of growing up, and the context of present day Ireland. Working across film, sculpture, performance, print and installation, they deftly consider the making of one’s belonging through the prisms of the body, the family and the nation state, exploring associated joy and trauma.

Following solo exhibitions in Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2023) and The Douglas Hyde, Dublin (2021-22), Rekab’s recent solo exhibition Mythlantics (2025-26) toured to SIRIUS, Cobh; Galway Arts Centre; Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda; and Limerick City Gallery. Their work was included in the Liverpool Biennial 2025, and is held in the collections of Trinity College Dublin, IMMA, The Cathal Ryan Trust and The Arts Council of Ireland.