Sophie Mak-Schram and collaborators: To Shift a Stone

What constitutes power, and who gets to hold it?

Across 2023 – 2025, artist Sophie Mak-Schram explored how power is experienced, shared, and challenged within Amgueddfa Cymru and Chapter.

Working with activists, community workers, artists, and museum staff, Sophie developed collaborative ‘tools’ that challenge and reimagine power structures.

These tools range from access templates and new working processes to modified megaphones and ceramic pieces, creating opportunities for shared learning and more equitable collaboration.

The resulting two-part exhibition, To Shift a Stone, focuses on categorisations (National Museum Cardiff) and forms of assembling (Chapter).

At National Museum Cardiff, the exhibition considers how objects are collected and identified, whose voice can be heard when speaking about these objects, and how to interrupt some of the hidden rules of the museum.

The exhibition features some of these tools alongside key items from across the museum’s collections, including the Schools Outreach Collection and the Asian Art corridor. It highlights how power shapes what is seen, preserved, and interpreted.

At Chapter, Sophie will be installing tools across the café to consider the different ways that those using the space might have more agency in shaping it. These tools will also provide moments to learn together or collaborate more equitably.

Sophie will also be creating a new artwork for Chapter’s billboard, greeting visitors as they arrive at the building.

Join us at National Museum Cardiff from 14 June and Chapter from 13 September to engage with – and touch, and try out! – elements of this project and explore its resulting exhibitions.

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Perspective(s)

Perspective(s) is a collaboration between the Arts Council of Wales and Amgueddfa Cymru, which seeks to bring about a step change in how the visual arts and heritage sector reflects the cultural and ethnic diversity of our society. The project is supported by the Welsh Government as part of a collective effort to meet the culture and heritage goals of the Anti-racist Wales Action Plan.