CATEGORY

Event: International Curator Talk with Sophie Mak-Schram on Monday, 31 March at 5pm

18 March, 2025

Join us as we hear from curator Sophie Mak-Schram who joins us at FSAS as our next visiting curator in 2025 as part of the International Curator Residency programme.

What can happen if audiences and ‘communities’ have more agency? Sophie Mak-Schram’s practice spans socially engaged art, experiential education, artistic research, activism and collective practices to explore and remake who, what and where we learn together. Sometimes this takes the form of assemblies, sometimes this work masquerades as art or exhibitionary formats. Across this work, Sophie cares about decoloniality, accessibility and belonging as something living and meaningful.
During this talk, Sophie will talk about various projects in which active collaborations were central: a collaboration with Jeanne van Heeswijk called Stretching Thresholds, Holding Streams (Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zürich, 2024-25), the convening of a Kurdish-Zapatista Assembly in collaboration with Denisse Vega de Santiago, Iliada Charalambous and the Van Abbemuseum (2021), and a far earlier project – an experimental residency exploring the boundaries of artist and audience, Overheard Map (various venues, 2015-2018).

Join us in the Project Space at FSAS (access via main entrance) on Monday, 31 March at 5pm.

Bio:
Sophie Mak-Schram cares about how a diverse “we” (come to) know and what form knowledge takes. She works with others, both as method and as form. Her work spans experiential education, inclusion work, collective practices, and artistic research. She convenes, writes, reads, makes objects to learn with or listen to, and performs. Currently, she’s (still) interested in the “and” between art and education, and speculative architectures that bridge or world between the two.

Recently, Sophie was Associate Artist with Peak Cymru during 2023–24 in relation to their work with young people, and one of seven Perspective(s) commissions funded by Arts Council Wales exploring decolonisation between 2023-25. She is a co-convener of Gentle Gestures, a porous international research group about forms of pedagogies across/through the arts, Research Associate at CCA Derry-Londonderry between 2024-25, and Curriculum Redefined Teaching Excellence lecturer at the University of Leeds. She completed a PhD about radical pedagogies in and of the arts as part of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Europewide PhD programme about the future(s) of socially engaged practices.

Sophie’s participation in this residency is supported by Arts Council Wales @celfcymruarts

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