Gain new skills, broaden your knowledge, and develop your career through workshops, courses, and study programs across disciplines.

Educational Opportunities

Royal College of Art

Contemporary Art Practice (CAP) at the RCA is a cutting-edge MA programme in the School of Arts & Humanities that is driven by a post-medium, critical approach to the making and reception of art, where theory and practice come together to form new ways of responding to the contemporary world. The programme supports the development of your art practice within a responsive, dialogical and critical environment with an emphasis on wider political issues – critically interrogating art production in relation to urgent socio-political contexts as well as questioning and redefining practice.

CAP supports ambitious, exploratory and research-driven artists, with programme specialisms in: critical, speculative and social art practices; moving image; performance; writing and techno-aesthetics. Our approach to Contemporary Art Practice is not determined by either technology or material, and CAP students create work using any media possible: from images, installations and moving image works, to publications and sonic art, participatory events, 3D modelling and VR, writing and performance.

The Contemporary Art Practice programme is profoundly attentive to the critical condition of our environment, humanity and the world around us and our students and graduates both contribute to and also expand the traditional roles assigned to artists to include modes of practice such as artist as activist, artist as publisher, artist as educator, artist as urban geographer and artist as community organiser. Students are encouraged to situate their practice within the social, political and economic conditions of the contemporary world; identifying what art can contribute to ongoing material, critical, technological and philosophical debates.

MA Contemporary Art Practice

Laura O'Hare

Join our free online Art Café with VAA arts marketing expert & mentor, Shirley-Ann O’Neill, where we will be discussing how self-representing artists can prepare for 2022 and to find and engage with art buyers in a more meaningful way.

VAA Art Café

Francesca

01.03 - 30.03.22
This workshop online provides an immersive and active understanding of curatorial practice and its developments in the last decades. Through the work of some of the most remarkable curators, the students will develop an understanding of how curating works by looking back at its history and by examining certain case studies. The analysis of specific editions of the Venice Art Biennale will give us the possibility to look to the predecessors and the influences of specific curators on their work. But it is also an opportunity to explore the ways in which the curatorial practices are changing and examine increasingly diverse approaches to exhibition-making.

RETHINKING MODELS OF THE VENICE BIENNALE 

Zurich University of the Arts

Applications open January 4, 2022

The Information Days will take place 22 to 26 November 2021:
22 November 2021 (on site, Toni Campus)
25 November 2021 (online)

The MA Fine Arts programme is a place to meet, find an audience, develop your practical and theoretical knowledge, and deepen the focus of your artistic enquiry, while being exposed to complementary streams, movements, and trends emerging from, influencing, or nourishing the contemporary art field.

The ZHdK MFA focuses on the deepening, professionalisation and contextualisation of its students’ artistic practice, combining knowledge and theories across disciplines and methodologies. Faculty and students form a dedicated community of established and emerging practitioners. The main objectives of the MFA are to provide a supportive environment for students to thrive as artists, and to help them develop a set of skills – practical and intellectual – with which to consolidate their careers. The MFA is also a place to expand one’s network through meetings with interesting figures from the fields of local and global contemporary culture. Opportunities to connect arise within the close-knit environment of the ZHdK, the city of Zurich, and Switzerland, as well as internationally.

As you integrate into a body of international students, you are encouraged to cluster into smaller groups and attend seminar group courses. These may be led by one or more tutors or convened through a process of self-organisation, coordinated by you or other students.

From the beginning of your work, whether formal or conceptual, you are invited to join challenging workshops in order to experience the potential of different materials and media. Well-equipped set-ups for photo, video, sound, and 3D printing, as well as for wood, metal, plaster, textile, ceramics, printmaking, etc., are open to all students. In parallel, you will attend seminars where you can learn about socially engaged art and its legacy, inspiration/appropriation/theft, post-human ecologies, radical visions and the language of resistance, artistic writing and filming, display, repetition as strategy, artistic research, imaginaries in transition, and much more.

The programme comprises not only individual projects, seminars, group tutorials, and art talk series, but also study trips to international venues. During the autumn of 2019, for example, MFA students have the opportunity to visit Venice and the 58th Biennale, and to participate in our ‘October School’ in Mexico City, which is dedicated to art in public spaces. This initiative is hosted by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. The October School brings together art universities from around the world, such as Shiv Nadar University in New Delhi and the University of Johannesburg. The ZHdK is also the initiator of a Global Shared Campus with active international exchange programmes, in particular with various partners from art universities in East and Southeast Asia.
If you choose to enrol in the MFA programme, your artistic practice may be studio-based or extend into a post-studio dimension, shaped by a multiplicity of analogue and digital media within today’s post-internet paradigm. Your work will be presented on various occasions, and ultimately at the final degree show, which represents the culmination of your studies.
