Sophie-Mak-Schram-and-collaborators-To-Shift-a-Stone/
To Shift a Stone
By Sophie Mak-Schram & Collaborators
National Museum Cardiff, 2025
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. 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. It includes re-displayed collection items alongside new writing, ceramics, sculptural and performance.
Collaborative work: 🥤 (Fizzy Brown Drink)
Sophie Mak-Schram and Parham Ghalamdar collaborated to produce a text-work informed by the current display of Asian art within National Museum Cardiff. Engraved onto metal, the piece reimagines the historical narrative of porcelain’s global circulation through the lens of twentieth-century Iran and its encounter with 🥤, a stand-in for Coca-Cola and Western consumerism.
Displayed in the "Asian art corridor" it was a response to, the work humourously interjects into the museum's historical account of global trade and points to the contemporary continuity of othering, exotisisation and global power dynamics of trade.
Photographed/documented by Dan Weill
