Sophie Mak-Schram and collaborators: To Shift a Stone

What constitutes power, and who gets to hold it?

To Shift A Stone, is a two-part exhibition at Chapter and Amgueddfa Cymru by Sophie Mak-Schram and collaborators that explores how power is experienced, shared and challenged within these cultural organisations and with their publics.

Since 2023 Sophie has been working with staff at Chapter and Amgueddfa Cymru together with activists, community workers and artists to develop collaborative ‘tools’ that challenge and reimagine power structures.

At Chapter, focusing on our café – a place of commerce, labour and leisure – Sophie and collaborators have been reimagining the ways we might assemble, rest and connect in this public space. ‘Tools’ including folding screens, textiles and audio works soften the architecture and create spaces for slowness, privacy and listening. Artwork from the Amgueddfa Cymru’s Schools Outreach Collection (1951–1990s), a collection of circulating objects and artworks that used to be sent out to schools across Wales, is displayed on the walls of Chapter, itself a former school. The former dissemination and mobility of these artworks bring into question how we might engage with art on our own terms, outside of cultural organisations and their curatorial frameworks.

Sophie’s billboard features artworks and objects from Amgueddfa Cymru and materials they have disregarded: glass found in the basement and a typeface designed based on an overlooked collection item, alongside images from Sophie’s own archives. Floating across the sky and the facade, these images are accompanied by the phrase ‘on hold’, with its repetition transforming it into the refrain ‘hold on’. Despite the continual promise of change in organisations towards more equitable and decolonial futures, creating and waiting for this change can feel like being endlessly on hold.

Over the past two years, Sophie’s work at both Chapter and Amgueddfa Cymru has disrupted structures and ways of working to rethink the distribution of power. This work has made it possible to envisage what change might look like and how it can manifest in our cultural institutions. Sophie’s work orientates us towards hope and ‘holding on’.

A public programme of events at Chapter and Amgueddfa Cymru will accompany To Shift A Stone. This includes the opening event on 12 September, 6pm and a free, twice-monthly running club between Chapter and Amgueddfa Genedlaethol, in which artworks from To Shift a Stone will be worn and run with. To receive updates about this programme, sign up to our newsletter.

This project involved the following collaborators and contributors:

George H. Wale, Rubie, Rounak Maiti, Kelly Lloyd, Katherine Agyemaa Agard, Christine Mak, Chris Adam, Mohammadali Mirzaei Souzani, Osian Grifford, Brynn Alred, Bianca Ali, Aliyy Azad Malik, Neil Coe, Mathew Salley, Amira Hayat, Hiba Fatima Ahmad, Ben Scattergood, John Thomas, Rhys Trimble, Polly Thomas-Colquhoun, Joseff Llewellyn, Frances Abigail Bolley, Parham Ghalamdar, San Ramos, Sonia Odedra, Salah Baba Rasool, Fahadi Mukulu, Umulkhayr Mohamed, Chantelle Lue, Sophie Lindsey, Rosey Brown, Oska VonRuhland, Meg Shergold, Silvia Dimitrova, Lia Parry and Isimbi Sebageni.

With thanks to staff at both Chapter and Amgueddfa Cymru for participating, supporting and stewarding this work.

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About the artist

Sophie Mak-Schram engages others in place-specific work around power, collectivity, knowledges and futures. Working with others both as method and as form, this work draws on experiential, artistic, decolonial and collective practices to convene, co-learn, re-imagine and invent. Sophie draws on 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 address how we know, who we consider ourselves in relation to, structures of power and ideas of belonging(s). Sophie convenes, facilitates, writes, reads, and makes objects to learn with or listen to.

About 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.