Sophie Mak-Schram and Alice Rekab: Dream Inheritances
Arts Company
Job Description
Chapter presentsDream Inheritances, a new exhibition bringing together Cardiff-based artist Sophie Mak-Schram and Dublin-based Irish/Sierra-Leonean artist Alice Rekab, who is presenting work in Wales for the first time.
The exhibition traces shared histories of mixed-race identity across Celtic contexts, placing Rekab's recent Dublin-made practice in dialogue with Sophie's socially engaged work in Cardiff. Both artists take identity as a starting point: Rekab explores questions of race, family and belonging in contemporary Ireland; Sophie draws on experiences of cultural and gender difference to collaborate with communities around power, belonging and futures.
Wales and Ireland share legacies of colonisation, contested language rights and cultural identities shaped by centuries of displacement and resistance. Both Dublin and Cardiff carry histories as port cities – sites of trade, migration and the racial and cultural diversity that followed. Taking "No Blacks No Dogs No Irish" – a sign historically displayed near ports including Cardiff Docks – as its conceptual anchor,Dream Inheritancesasks what it means to belong when belonging has been actively refused, and what inherited and imagined futures become possible from that position.
The exhibition brings together new and existing works by both artists, spanning sculpture, digital collage, expanded painting and film. The artists have jointly created a new large-scale wallpaper for the exhibition,Reorienting dreams(2026), that explores their migratory lineages, connecting China, Sierra Leone, Syria, Ireland and Wales. It drawson family and found archives — photographs, heirlooms and architectures to create a space of hybrid diasporic kinship.
Sophie’s series of silk and bamboo sculptures,Assurances(2026), take the form of room-dividers with imagery of water and recalled childhood photographs, reflecting on fluidity of transcultural identities.
Dream Inheritances centres on the complexity of mixedness: mixed-race identities, non-white Celtic cultures, and the contested political histories that bind Wales and Ireland.
The exhibition also includes a public programme developed in collaboration with Humairah Hussain and Tashlima Rahman, two Young Producers from Riverside Warehouse Youth Club, who worked with Sophie between April and September 2026, a new textile work by the Girls Club from Riverside Warehouse Youth Club in collaboration with Sophie and in dialogue with Alice, and new works by Jessica Horsley and Catrin Cheung, two emerging Global Majority artists based in Wales, supporting their professional development alongside the show.