07 October 2026

Feminist Library: Archives as Living, Learning Bodies

An in-conversation event with Durre Shahwar and Sophie Mak-Schram

About:

Sophie Mak-Schram (she/they) is an artist whose practice spans artistic research, radical pedagogies and collaborative, place-specific work around power, collectivity, knowledges and futures. This work is informed by 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 work with collaborators to make tools that can shift power, gather groups and offer ways of being in relation (to each other, to place, to institutions) differently.

Recent work includes Palmstones (2026), a billboard commissioned by Llantarnam Grange, Dream Inheritances (2026), a duo show with Alice Rekab at Chapter, and To Shift a Stone (2025-2026), a two-sited exhibition across Chapter and National Museum Cardiff. In 2026, they were also commissioned to respond to Tessa Boffin's work as part of the UK-touring exhibition Where We Touch the Archive (2026), by Devonshire Collective, Backlit, Photoworks and Aspex Gallery, and their first monograph, Pedagogies of the Art-Proximate will be published by Robida in autumn. Sophie is currently Lecturer in Fine Art at Cardiff Metropolitan University and part of BAK Basecamp for Tactical Imaginaries.

Durre Shahwar (she/they) is an interdisciplinary writer, researcher, and artist. Her work deconstructs established frameworks to present counternarratives that capture the complexities of lived experiences when situated within social, cultural, political, and geographical landscapes. She is co-editor of Gathering: Women of Colour on Nature (404 INK, 2024) and Just So You Know (Parthian Books, 2020). Her solo photo exhibition and accompanying pamphlet on archives, seeking sanctuary, and documentation, One of the Good Ones, was exhibited in Ffotogallery, Cardiff, 2026.

Durre has a PhD in autofiction and Pakistani-Welsh identity from Cardiff University. She teaches creative writing within and outside higher education. She was the recipient of Lapidus International Creative Bridges Award in 2025, and a Future Wales Fellowship in 2022. Durre is currently working on her debut non-fiction book which was highly commended for the Morley Lit Prize in 2022.

About the session:

How do lived experiences leave traces in archives, and how do those experiences shape the ways we engage with archival material?

Drawing on their recent commissions, Durre Shahwar’s One of the Good Ones (2026) at Ffotogallery and Sophie Mak-Schram’s contribution to the touring exhibition Where We Touch the Archive (2026), Durre and Sophie shared their approaches to artistic engagement with archival material from racialised, queer and crip perspectives.

The evening included snippets of writing and film from both commissions, alongside a discussion of the different considerations and approaches involved in processes of self and collective archiving. Together, they explored how archives can hold, reveal and complicate lived experiences, and how artists can engage with them to create new traces and possibilities.