Overview
This programme allows you to integrate both fine art practice and the study of history of art in the context of contemporary visual culture. Throughout the programme, you'll be required to participate actively in seminars, discussing your own work and that of other students.
The programme is made up of:
- Fine art studio practice, taught in the Department of Art, develops your work through experimentation, with the aim of achieving a thorough understanding of your chosen media and their relevance within contemporary culture. Three years of intensive studio and workshop practice culminate in the final year exhibition which is assessed and then opened to the public.
- History of art modules taught through lectures, seminars and tutorials in the Department of Visual Cultures.
- An interdisciplinary Link Seminar taught across both departments, which explores the dynamic relationships between art history, theory and practice in large seminar and small workshop formats.
Year 1 (credit level 4)
Studio Practice focuses on the acquisition of fundamental knowledge and gives you the basic practical skills necessary to initiate your research. You will gain experience of making art independently and an awareness of the interaction between the history of art and theory as it relates to your studio practice.
Your tutors assess your Studio Practice coursework continuously and your work is also assessed through an end-of-year presentation.
In Art History, you will develop an independent critical involvement with works of art and visual culture. Our first-year modules enable you to examine changing conceptions of art and the artist, historically and also in terms of context, ideas, and kinds of practice.
Each of our first-year modules is taught by a team of four or five different teachers from the permanent faculty. In this way, first-year students soon get to know many of the Department’s core academic staff. You will therefore begin your second year with both rich insights from and a comprehensive overview of Department life as a whole.
All students take a compulsory compulsory Art History module:
Module title |
Credits |
Modernities
Modernities
30 credits
This module is designed to introduce you to Art Historical and scholarly methodologies that centre critical thinking, social justice, racial equity, and decoloniality through the theme of Modernity. When we speak of 'modernity' we might summon up a range of possible meanings relating to time, change, progress, technology, industrialisation, rationalisation, coloniality, protest, and silence. Modernity has social, technological, political, economic and cultural aspects. This interdisciplinary field can be understood in different ways from different perspectives across time and place, therefore, the module understands modernity to be multiple.
You'll the ways in which art and visual culture has participated in this interdisciplinary field. You'll consider questions of historiography and while insisting that art history can be told in multiple ways, the module proceeds chronologically. Using a chronological method, we are able to both demonstrate and critically interrogate the effects of this dominant form of writing history. Recognising that we are all a part of the ‘Western Academy’, we take care to critically examine how the power dynamics of Western thought continue to influence academia, art history, and creative practices today. By insisting on polycentricism – or centring multiple perspectives – we introduce you to practices of decolonising art history in a manner that will help to inform your own research projects and learning.
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30 credits |
Plus one of the following modules:
Module title |
Credits |
Space and Time
Space and Time
30 credits
In this module, you'll consider how modern and contemporary visual practices incorporate questions of space and time and how different media spatialise and temporalise cultural experiences and social meanings.
You'll explore a wide variety of visual practices and the space and time in which they are produced and encountered so as to examine their cultural, social, and political horizons. You'll look at the ways in which an engagement with space and time potentially reconfigures the relation between cultural practices and the expanded socio-cultural and historical fields. From the perspective os cultural practice and experience of space and time, art and art historical dependencies on the chronological will also be interrogated and explored. You'll learn the ways in which many artworks, especially outside of the confines of Western discourses, produce unconventional experiences of space and time that present interpretive challenges and provoke critical questions.
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30 credits |
Beyond Boundaries
Beyond Boundaries
30 credits
In this module, you'll explore the aesthetic practices that challenge what constitutes the borders and boundaries of art historical study. You'll examine expanded practices that go beyond the gallery; art and activism; art beyond the avant-garde; new technologies of the image and also the effectiveness of cultural translation, i.e. to what extent art can move beyond its traditional borders, and conversely, to what extent such practices can be absorbed into the study of art.
You'll reference a number of case studies and accompanying theories – historical and contemporary – that testify to the increasingly wide and diverse field of ‘Visual Culture’ as a discipline, but also to the radical nature of practices that refuse and go beyond given forms and historical categories.
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30 credits |
Your first year will introduce you to history of art as a discipline and engage you in discussion of key aspects of contemporary visual culture – including not just artefacts in museums and art galleries, but also architecture, cityscape and landscape, adverts, TV and film, websites, the body, and street style.
You must pass all components to progress to the following year.
Year 2 (credit level 5)
Studio Practice in Year 2 begins to deal with more complex issues and a selective application of acquired knowledge and practical skills. It is a period of experimentation and synthesis, expanding and deepening your practice.
Your tutors assess your Studio Practice coursework continuously and you make a presentation of selected work for a viva voce in the third term, where you will be asked to discuss your work in depth.
History of Art in Year 2 will involve you taking two option modules. These currently include:
- Beckett & Aesthetics
- Cohabitations/Inhbitations
- Art and Technologies of the Image
- The Fact of Blackness
- Fashion as a Dialectical image
- Ornamentation & Materiality
- Museums, Galleries, Exhibitions
- Popular Modernism
- Patterns of Perception
- Postmodernities
- Radical Imagination & Speculative Voyages
You will also take the following compulsory module.
Module title |
Credits |
The Link
The Link
15
Second-year module.
Link Workshops and Seminars are coordinated by both Fine Art and by History of Art tutors. The workshops are based on current exhibitions and events or themes generated by students. The seminars are based on how practice and theory intermingle in practitioners work. The seminars and workshops aim to directly explore the interaction of practice and theory in fluid and diverse ways. Link Workshops and Seminars are directed towards developing students’ critical vocabulary and inventing new ways of thinking about the inter-relationship between practice and theory in their own work. Students produce a short Link Paper (three pages max), which addresses the interface between practice and theory as it is taken up in their work.
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15 |
Year 3 (credit level 6)
Studio Practice at this level reflects an independent, self-motivated practice and your potential to work as an artist. You will demonstrate a high degree of understanding, critical awareness and independent judgement. At this level, you will have consolidated your practical and critical skills in preparation for the Final Exhibition and further independent practice.
Your tutors assess your Studio Practice coursework continuously and at the end of the year you mount an exhibition of your Studio Practice for assessment, which is then open to the public.
In History of Art you take 45 credits from a list of Special Subjects and option modules, or 15 credits from the list of Special Subjects and option modules, plus a dissertation of 8,000–10,000 words (30 credits).
You will also take the following compulsory module.
Module title |
Credits |
The Link
The Link
15
Third-year module.
Link Workshops and Seminars are coordinated by both Fine Art and by History of Art tutors. The workshops are based on current exhibitions and events or themes generated by students. The seminars are based on how practice and theory intermingle in practitioners' work. The seminars and workshops aim to directly explore the interaction of practice and theory in fluid and diverse ways. Link Workshops and Seminars are directed towards developing students’ critical vocabulary and inventing new ways of thinking about the inter-relationship between practice and theory in their own work. Students produce a short, 3 pages maximum Link Paper, which addresses the interface between practice and theory as it is taken up in their work.
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15 |
Special Subjects and option modules include:
Module title |
Credits |
Animating Architecture
Animating Architecture
15 credits
Animating Architecture explores significant movements in architecture and urban design from the mid-19th 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.
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15 credits |
Archive and Spectacle
Archive and Spectacle
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Film Fables
Film Fables
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Documentary Lives
Documentary Lives
15 credits
Documentary Lives explores documentary practice and language not as a genre but as a relational way of life. The module links documentary to a series of discussions on ethics and what constitutes lives or what it means to be alive and be alive with others. With this approach the module accounts for the complicated relationship between the proposed urge to represent, to witness and give testimony of injured and impaired lives and the lack of a straight line between visual and political representation. We look at how documentability is challenged but also expanded through silence, refusal, the ephemeral, the sensual, affect, the imperceptible and when we think life beyond human lives. The module will present recent examples from South Asia and the Middle East which have approached the above conundrums of ‘representing conflict’ in diverse forms, through cinema, still images or online footage archives (e.g. Mozireen, Pad.ma).
One further crucial focus will be ‘observation as participation’, for which we will be drawing on recent anthropological debates proposing experimental and speculative approaches to documentary film research while at the same time stressing the researchers and filmmakers position of being implicated or part of whatever environment she looks at or rather observes in. Hereby we will address our own locations and relations within global scenarios of conflict and how this might engender a political living with others.
Throughout the module we will explore the above through small research and filmmaking exercises and a group fieldtrip.
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15 credits |
Landscape and Power
Landscape and Power
30 credits
This module investigates how landscape forms what WJT Mitchell calls a process or a site of action that catalyses the social and political to unfold. From this perspective landscape is used in this course to take stock of the image and representation of four interconnected terrains: land, sea, air and outer space.
Landscape and Power considers what landscape as a process could possibly mean in the face of climate change, drone attacks, remote satellite imaging, forced migrations and rapid industrial expansion, and asks how that process is mobilised in both still and moving images, and in literature.
This module draws on both historical and contemporary sites to consider methods of narrating the landscape when the optics of what constitutes the landscape are rapidly changing.
Boundaries between human impact and nature are increasingly eroded as are the boundaries between land and sea, future and past. This destabilises the relationship between figure and ground so central to the discourse on landscape, as it provides other possible relationships between the human and landscape that erodes the distinctions between them, challenges whether the human or the terrain is the figure, and whether the landscape can continue to take on the role of the ground.
Consequently notions of subjectivity, interiority and forms of memory are central themes that permeate this module.
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30 credits |
Philosophy and...
Philosophy and...
30 credits
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.
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30 credits |
Sexual Poetics
Sexual Poetics
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
The Truth in Painting
The Truth in Painting
30 credits
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.
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30 credits |
Research Architecture
Research Architecture
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Counter Forensics
Counter Forensics
15 credits
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'.
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15 credits |
Invited artists, curators, gallerists, administrators and funders will provide you with specialist advice and further information to complement your studies and prepare you for professional life after graduation.
Teaching style
This programme is taught through intensive studio and research art practice, tutorials and mixed-year studio practice presentations. You'll also attend weekly art history lectures and seminars.
You'll be allocated a studio space that will be the focal point of your activities. Students from all three levels share the studio spaces, providing valuable peer support. You will determine the nature of your practice and, with guidance from the tutorial staff, be encouraged to work in any medium that you choose.
The following information gives an indication of the typical proportions of learning and teaching for each year of this programme*:
- Year 1 - 16% scheduled learning, 84% independent learning
- Year 2 - 16% scheduled learning, 84% independent learning
- Year 3 - 4% scheduled learning, 81% independent learning, 5% placement
How you’ll be assessed
You’ll be assessed by a variety of methods, depending on your module choices. These include coursework, examinations, group work and projects.
The following information gives an indication of how you can typically expect to be assessed on each year of this programme*:
- Year 1 - 50% coursework, 50% practical
- Year 2 - 90% coursework, 10% practical
- Year 3 - 75% coursework, 25% practical
*Please note that these averages are based on enrolments for 2022/23. Each student’s time in teaching, learning and assessment activities will differ based on individual module choices.
Download the programme specification.
Please note that due to staff research commitments not all of these modules may be available every year.
Between 2020 and 2022 we needed to make some changes to how programmes were delivered due to Covid-19 restrictions. For more information about past programme changes please visit our programme changes information page.