BA (Hons) Curating

This module provides a historical preface for the whole of your degree studies, which centre on modern and contemporary art and visual culture. How has the concept of modernity arisen, and how has its meaning varied and evolved in recent history, in terms of art, ideas, events and technological change? 

This module provides an introduction to curating that is grounded in modern and contemporary ideas of the public, exploring both how galleries and museums conceptualise their public role, but also the proliferation of artistic and curatorial activities that have moved beyond the gallery: from the streets, to libraries, parks, care homes, to the internet, social justice organisations, festivals and and schools. Students will begin to map their own interests in this expanded field of curating.

This module is an introduction to various ways in which artists, curators and communities  have dealt with material artefacts in response to changing social and political conditions. Through visits to archives and repositories of art and other artefacts, students will be introduced to the various ways in which such objects have been thought and organised.


In what senses may the meaning and effect of a work depend on the way we see it, and what factors are in play, in terms of subjectivity, exhibition, aesthetic ideas, and concepts of realism?

How have space and time and their interaction come to play a central part in modern and contemporary visual practices? We consider the question under different headings: the photographic instant, memory, the present time of everyday experience, and imaginary dimensions of space and time.

Contemporary art has gone beyond the limits of traditional practice. How and why has this come about? How do we make sense of and evaluate these innovations in our field of study?

This module explores how the museum has evolved from an object-centred educational institution into an idea-oriented site for the production of experiences. It observes various approaches to the New Museology that depicts the museum as an open source, an infinite narrative, a participatory public space. This module will introduce artists’ responses to the cultural frame of the museums, to its inclusions and exclusions. Taking as a starting point artist Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum and other forms of institutional critique from the 1960s to date, the module will examine seminal exhibitions among others Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form: Works – Concepts – Processes – Situations – Information; Les Immateriaux; Les Magiciens de La Terre and Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa; as well as ground-breaking projects, such as The Third Bienal de La Habana and 11th Documenta. The last two weeks of the module are dedicated to a non-Western contemporary art scene as case study. This year: South Africa.

This module will consider a wide range of institutions and investigate different frameworks for understanding and defining museums. In addition, it examines key exhibitions and museum collections, asking how our understanding of contemporary culture is constructed and displayed. A particular emphasis is placed on critical concepts such as representation and institutional critique.

As museums and galleries move into the realm of idea-driven experiences, artists and curators have critically re-visited questions of education and research, breaking down traditional hierarchies, setting up alternative ‘schools’ and research centres and placing their work in direct and often experimental encounters with the public. How does this moment differ from past cultural and artistic engagements with the educational field? What are the contemporary conditions that have contributed to this renewed interest in education and research? How have arts and other organisations responded to this ‘turn’ and what new terrains for practicing art and curating have opened up? Students in this module will learn about the key debates in pedagogical theory that underpin contemporary questions of education and research, they will examine and practice particular strategies of public engagement and research and they will use this knowledge to develop a situated research project with a public sector organisation. The module proceeds in three sections including:

1. Core debates in critical pedagogical theory, through which students will be introduced to different concepts and practices of education and how they underpin particular approaches to artistic, curatorial and other social practices.

2. Participatory and Pedagogical Practices - which looks at the practices used by artists, curators, community and activist groups in which strategies and practices will be introduced and analysed in detail and core debates around questions of the politics of participation will be developed.

3. The Curatorial as Field Work: will address theories and practices of research or fieldwork that have evolved in the inhabited by the placement sites with sessions on methods applied to cultural institutions as well as to education, social and civic sector settings.

In the second term, alongside regular lectures and seminars, students will develop a situated analysis of a public sector organisation through which they will apply critical research skills to a particular public sector organisation. In this 10-week placement, students will observe and analyse curatorial and engagement strategies, and exercise chosen research methods to develop a written and presented analysis. In the first term, students will prepare for this experience by developing proposals and approaches to their placement. In addition, laboratory sessions with a practitioner in the curatorial field will be open to all students on the BA Curating.

A group project is undertaken with London-based public-sector partners. It involves curating an exhibition or public intervention based on the exploration of a theme or issue of interest. Throughout the project you will develop valuable skills in planning, programming, publicising, and exhibiting the project alongside the development of conceptual framework and writing around the project.

Cézanne promised Emile Bernard that he would tell him ‘the truth in painting’, adding that this was something he owed him. This promise of the truth (which Derrida adopted as the title for a book of essays on painting and aesthetics) seems to imply that painting has something akin to a philosophical or ethical dimension.  The course will be concerned with examining points at which painting and philosophy come into contact (often through later philosophical or theoretical reflection on earlier art).  Several broad themes will be seen to recur throughout our discussions, concerning spectatorship, optics, the theorising of practice, problems of explanation and interpretation, and the relationship between painting and language.

In the first part of the module, we will discuss a small number of painters working between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, approaching them largely through present-day critical and theoretical perspectives.  The second part will be concerned with twentieth century attempts to re-found painting and to redefine the terms both of practice and of the viewer’s engagement with the work.  Main topics here will include Cubist collage, 1920s abstraction, American abstract painting, and painting after the critical turn to semiotics.  Painters to be particularly considered during the course will include, among others, Velazquez, Chardin, Cézanne, Mondrian, Klee, Barnett Newman, Agnes Martin, Marlene Dumas, Gerhard Richter. There will be scope for students to discuss work by painters of their own choice, in the context established by the module, in presentations and written work.

Terms such as sex, gender, sexuality, and sexual difference now frequent in visual culture, yet they stem from divergent theoretical trajectories. This module will reflect upon some of these past and future paths. While critically engaging the anthropological and sociological traditions that produced ‘gender’ as the central term of feminist inquiry (Rubin), the module delivers a stronger engagement with feminist theory influenced by continental philosophy (Kristeva, Irigaray) as well as material feminism with its renewed engagement with the life sciences (Haraway, Wilson, Aristarkhova). In light of queer theory’s critique of heteronormativity (Butler), the module asks after the past and future trajectories of key figures such as the maternal, paternal and the child. All aspects will be discussed in relation to a wide range of films, plays and artworks.

This module introduces you to philosophical and conceptual reflection in relation to a number of artistic expressions such as literature, music, cinema, photography and painting. Several questions will be explored, including:

a) can a philosopher write about a specific art form in the way in which he can write about any other subject or about any other art form?
b) how does the relation to art and a specific art form change when it is determined conceptually?
c) how is philosophical reflection affected by the tendency of the arts to blur the demarcating lines that run between them?

Our reading list includes work by Jean-Luc Nancy, Theodor W Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault.

Film Fables explores documentary practice and language not as a genre but as varied instantiations of the political, as critique and proposition. With this approach we will explore documentary’s experimentations with actuality to produce versions of reality and the real, often through modes of fiction and fabulation. We will first address how historical moments of radical socio-political transformation have provoked new documentary forms and what understanding of change, revolution, the political voice, the address of the spectator/ citizen and cinematic pedagogy were created hereby. This is accompanied by thinking with and through documentary research practices such as observation, ethnography, conversation/ interview or militant/ intervention, leading to essayistic, performative, educational, militant or first person modalities.

Theorizations of the political and political fiction will be linked to singular formulations of political cinema through e.g. anti-colonial and feminist movements globally and we will ask how these impact our current thinking through the relation between cinema and our political being in the world. We will link historical markers to recent audio-visual practices, which respond critically to social, political and audio-visual forms of governmentality defining our contemporary moment. Examples will include diverse global perspectives and those circulating within and across art, cinema and activist context. 

Throughout the course we will explore documentary practices ourselves through small filmmaking exercises and a group fieldtrip.

Two paradigms that have emerged in recent decades for thinking through the multifarious facets of display are archive and spectacle. These two paradigms - and their complex intertwining - express the mechanism by which a thing is attributed a value and/or made visible through, perhaps inevitably, the exercise of power. At stake between archive and spectacle is thus the question of representation – representation as the experience of visibility or display, the practice of making something visible, particularly in the curatorial sense, and the condition that dictates the limits of what visibility constitutes.

This module stages an intense engagement with the concepts archive and spectacle and a reflection on how as theoretical constructs they may implicate and inform contemporary exhibitionary- and collections-based practices.

Animating Architecture explores significant movements in architecture and urban design from the mid-19^th Century to the present day. Students are invited to consider the history of modern and contemporary architecture as a complex political problematic; one that is ‘animated’ by the contingent and dynamic social processes which shape urban space. We begin by looking at the crystallisation of the theory of the ‘modern’ city in context of a wider project to choreograph the technological forces and social relations of industrialisation and global trade. Later we shall consider the way the project of modernisation and the experience of modernity was distorted and reshaped by regional pressures giving rise to new aesthetic forms and spatial practices. Considering these moments as reflections on, and representations of, a complex conjuncture of historical and geographical elements we will discuss how postwar debates on architectural modernism shed light on the increasingly spatial nature of politics, economics, and culture. Finally, we turn to the question of a general ‘crisis of architecture’ precipitated by the rise of neoliberalism and finance capital in the mid-1970s. Here we evaluate the contemporary role architectural space plays in diagnosing and representing the postmodern nature of globalisation. And we shall discuss what remains of the modern project in an era when the design and management of the spatial fabric is increasingly colonised, maintained and engineered by an emergent ‘global art’ of urban biopolitics.

Dr Jorella Andrews

This 10-week module explores examples of modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in which ornamentation is foregrounded. Our visual resources embrace 19th and early 20th practices—such as the Arts and Crafts Movement, Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Art Deco and Surrealism—as well as contemporary visual and digital works like Natalie Bookchin's single-channel video installation Mass Ornament of 2009 and Isaac Julien's critical/decorative film installations. We investigate the cultural and political contexts surrounding the emergence of these ornamentally inclined works, and examine how their impact and worth have been analysed and interpreted. Within the context of these studies we will consider models and logics of ornamentation drawn from African, Islamic and Oriental as well as Western cultures, make use of Goldsmiths’ rare books and textile collections, and experiment with a range of visually orientated research techniques including IPA (Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis).

In his unfinished work The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin formulates the dialectical image in terms of fashion, stating “The eternal is in any case far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea” [B3,7; N3,2]. Taking Benjamin’s thought on fashion as its impetus, this module will focus on the dialectical image as both a concept and a method, and Second Empire Paris, Benjamin’s capital of modernity. We will explore the role that fashion has historically played as an instrument of Western cultural hegemony as well as the subversive power that it simultaneously bears. We will extend Benjamin’s concern to the inherent qualities of fashion pertaining to representation, both in the sense of personal agency and the semiotic. Benjamin’s engagement with Surrealism, with its own preoccupation with fashion, is notable here. There is a particular emphasis on the relation of fashion to the imaginary, with its uncanny ability to hybridize culture and disrupt the norms of gender, class, species, as well as geographical space and chronological time.

This module takes its title from a notorious mistranslation of Frantz Fanon’s fifth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks. More adequately translated as “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” the text explores the production of black identity as an explicitly visual process—a result of seeing oneself be seen.

Centralizing Fanon’s insights for theorizing the production of difference in the visual field, this course analyzes the ways in which anti-colonial and anti-racist thought has been central to the theorization of subjectivity within colonial modernity. Taking the specificity of Fanon’s model as our cue, we will thus broaden our trajectory to examine the ways in which difference becomes visually knowable and experienced through particular scopic regimes, especially as it relates to the production of racialized and gendered bodies. How have philosophers and theorists of difference tested the very terms of visibility so often reinforced by discourses of racism and subjugation? “Subjects of Difference” explores theories of subject-production and otherness both contemporaneous to Fanon’s moment of decolonization and respondent to it. How have various models of subject-production (Marxist, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, existential, feminist) imagined the appearance of difference in the visual field? And how has the visual field itself been analyzed? In order to explore these questions we will look to classic texts that inaugurated the study of visuality and race as well as the contributions of feminist theory, queer theory, visual studies and performance studies in the rethinking of difference and the politics of representation. Thus, while we begin from a study of blackness, our analyses will consider the ways in which difference is relationally produced.

The module is divided into two parts. Part 1 looks at how different (especially post-structuralist and feminist) theorisations of the relationships between knowledge and power, as well as more recent critiques to the scientific protocols of truth production underpinning the modern project (for example, Latour, Daston), might offer the tools to reinvigorate new forms of objectivity and produce 'well-constructed facts'.

Part 2 examines different documentary practices that have strived to become tools of social and political struggle in times of conflict and global crisis by mobilising some of these tools, paying particular attention to the techniques and technologies used to collect, store, analyse and broadcast information. From radical cartographic practices to different forms of witnessing and testimony in the context of human rights reporting; from socialist avant-garde art practices to documentary photography; from critical forensic practices to environmental impact assessments; many practices have insisted on the political necessity to 'stage truth', treating the real as an effect to be produced rather than attempting to recuperate a lost authenticity.

For many years, visual cultures have explored the unstable life of truth production protocols in the visual, aural and spatial realms. This module builds upon that tradition to ask anew, in what has been ambiguously defined as the age of post-truth politics, how to create 'new zones of entanglement between the aesthetic and the ethic, between artifice and authenticity'.

This module draws from the specific research ethos and methodologies developed at the Centre for Research Architecture and the Turner Prize-nominated Forensic Architecture (FA) agency, which use spatial practices to investigate politics, media, ecology, and human rights, and engage with the urgent political conditions of our time.

The specific focus of the module will be selected amongst some of the ongoing investigations carried out at the Centre and at FA, looking at a growing number of social, political and military conflicts that unfold today. These forms of spatial and environmental violence, often occurring gradually and operating invisibly, pose epistemological and aesthetic challenges: they demand that we think simultaneously along historical, socio-political, and climatic lines, and across larger temporal and territorial scales.

The module will look at these threshold conditions (the relation between changing environmental conditions and racial exclusion, urban transformations, colonial histories, migration patterns, etc) through a spatial and visual lens.

Visual Cultures is a field of inquiry that engages with a variety of creative or cultural practices within larger socio-political contexts. The questions we ask are very much informed by the urgencies of the world we all live in, locally and globally, historically and within a contemporary context. Visual Cultures is interested in what art does in the world.

With this background, the central objective of Visual Cultures as Public Practice is to offer students a research opportunity within a public body. This public body could be from the field of art and cultural practice, such as Museums or Archives, it could be a social or political organisation, but could also be from a completely different field that you are interested in. The placement should allow you a substantial engagement with material and practices from outside the university context and to develop a research project from there. The aim is for you to be introduced to the materials and practices by the placement partners and to be given initial support to understand the larger context and everyday practices of the organisation.

Research could include an ethnography of the organisation itself as well as a thorough engagement with an aspect of the organisation's materials. You will be asked to identify and develop a focused and manageable research project in discussion with your academic supervisor who will assist the process through group seminars and tutorials. You will also develop a personal portfolio, based on your experience where you explore how the work that you do within your university courses relates to the practices of the public organisations hosting your project.

You will be working towards a final presentation of your research project in the form of an academic essay. Your findings could however also lead to a small exhibition, a talk, a text, a performance, performative lecture or any other appropriate form. This presentation can take place within the public organisation, at Goldsmiths or another place of your choice in agreement with the host organisation. In addition to this academic submission, you will be asked to choose as a group between writing a short reflective text or presentation about the placement experience. 

Please note: We will endeavour to source placements from across a wide range of areas but cannot guarantee specific placements. We will discuss specific places after we received all expression of interest. If you have your own link, you can propose this as well.