Event:To Shift a Stone: Reading Circle

Labels, identities, decolonising, accessibility: there are a lot of nuances to the artworks and processes involved in To Shift a Stone. Join us to read and discuss together around some of the project’s themes, as part of a free, three-part reading circle.

Each reading circle will be curated by an artist, activist or theorist whose own work dovetails with the themes of To Shift a Stone. They will choose texts (prose, poetry, theory, music), which we will then explore and reflect on together. You don’t need any prior knowledge, just a curious mind, to join us!

The session will be co-curated by artist and writer Taey Iohe, who invites you to read the writings of Vandana Shigh, Jackie Wang, June Jordan and Johanna Hedva to explore unfinished stories and remaining vulnerable in response to museum processes of categorisation and global realities of loss, illness and ecological collapse. 

The session Touch Shift Tell, will be co-curated by Kelly Lloyd, whose ceramic collaboration with Sophie are on show in the exhibition. Together with Kelly and Sophie, we will read and think together about narration as a strategy to perform the limits of historical collections. We'll be reading extracts of Saidiya Hartman and Katrina Palmer's work, as well as Katherine Agyemaa Agard's text with Esyllt Angharad Lewis which is part of To Shift a Stone.

The session Sharing and Caring, will be co-curated by Nat Raha, activist-scholar and poet. What can being open to each other and existing together in politicised communities do? Together we'll read extracts from Wages Due Lesbians, Lola Olufemi and Fred Moten & Stefano Harney to think about possession, sharing and how to care-take objects and each other.
 

If you have any access requirements, please email Kate Breeze on perspectives@museumwales.ac.uk to arrange support - there is a specific budget for access, which might include travel, carers, translating (including BSL), or the booking of wheelchairs etc. Access needs might be discussed in order to understand what’s feasibly possible, but we will not be requesting ‘proof’: we trust you know what you need to best be able to join us.
 

Information

Location - National Museum Cardiff (Gallery 14) 
 

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.
 

Taey Iohe is an artist, writer, and listener, born near the Han River and now living between the River Lea and the River Ching. Their work moves fluidly through poetry, sound, moving image, and social practice, grounded in an eco-crip sense of belonging. They are currently an artist-researcher with Making Time at Artangel, exploring multiple forms of leakage — from bodies, from histories, from wounded ecologies. 
 

Kelly Lloyd is a transdisciplinary artist and educator who focuses on issues of representation and knowledge production and prioritizes public-facing collaborative research. Lloyd creates installations that combine text, murals, and discrete objects, and writes essays that she occasionally performs. In these installations, paintings, sculptures, essays, and lectures Lloyd tries to create absurd form/content relationships. Lloyd has recently held solo exhibitions at the Royal Academy Schools (London), Crybaby (Berlin), Bill’s Auto (Chicago), Demo Room (Aarhus), and Dirty House (London) for which she won the Art Licks Workweek Prize.

Dr Nat Raha is an activist-scholar and poet, whose work considers queer, transfeminist and anti-colonial practices of liberation, present, past and future. She is the author of four books of poetry, most recently apparitions (nines) (Nightboat Books, 2024). With Mijke van der Drift, Nat is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024) and co-editor of Radical Transfeminism zine. She teaches at the Glasgow School of Art.