Sophie Mak-Schram

Chapter Arts Centre and National Museum Cardiff

Megaphone used by the Wales Anti-Apartheid Movement during the 1980s. 

Jade cup (Ming Dynasty) AD 1500-1600, carved in the shape of an ancient bronze ritual vessel, with dragon handles.

Bio

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.

Project description

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 Arts Centre.

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.

Quote

“Decolonising involves the reorientation of many values and structures that currently oppress most of us. The question is, in the European context, can one decolonise from a colonial centre? I have been working on themes that relate to this question across my artistic and academic work for a long time, and am now excited to be working in the specific context of Cardiff, a city with a lot of complex histories.”

Visiting the exhibition

Further information about the exhibition and how to visit can be found on our Whats on page