zhdk ma fine arts programme
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.