Fine Art with Contemporary Cultural Theory BA

Program Overview

The program fosters creativity, critical thinking, and transferable skills, preparing graduates for diverse careers in the arts and creative industries. With opportunities for study abroad, internships, and research, the program cultivates ambitious and innovative artists and art professionals.

Program Outline

It approaches fine art as a collection of forms, concepts, and creative methods for addressing pressing societal issues. The program aims to equip students to act in the world as artists and creative global citizens, innovators in their respective fields of making. It prepares graduates to be socially conscious with relevant and transferable skills. Students will immerse themselves in a range of art techniques and practices, experiment with their creativity, and discover their personal style. They will have access to a dedicated studio space, allowing them to embrace a multitude of materials and methods. Through professional development programs, such as weekly visiting art talks and surfacing skills workshops, students will discover their desired practitioner role. Students will work alongside art historians and cultural theorists within a purpose-built School that includes studios, technical workshops, a project gallery, seminar rooms, and a shared student common room.

Outline:

The program is structured across three years, with a focus on both studio practice and the theory and analysis of culture. Students will develop and exhibit their work every year, evolving a personalized approach to achieving their creative aspirations and developing an ambitious body of work. They will be guided by artist-lecturers, technicians, visiting practitioners, and original thinkers, while gaining a critical awareness of their own identity as a creative practitioner.

Year 1:

• Compulsory Modules:
• Introduction to Practice (40 credits):
This module introduces students to contemporary and traditional approaches to fine art across a range of disciplines, including film, experimental printmaking, ceramics, art writing, sculpture, photography, and audio-visual practices. Students will engage with artists, tutors, and curators through practical studio workshops, live projects, and exhibition opportunities. They will develop skills to discuss and analyze contemporary art, deepen their understanding of art history and critical theory, and build critical awareness of the spaces, institutions, social practices, and networks in which art is produced and disseminated.
• Practice [2] (40 credits): This module continues the development of independent studio work for developing self-directed practice-based research.
Students will engage with lectures, seminars, tutorials, and visiting speakers, contributing to discussions around contemporary art practice and professional development. They will work in self-selected groups to realize some form of exhibition or equivalent public presentation of their work.
• Introduction to Cultural Analysis 1 (20 credits): This module introduces ways of reading different aspects of culture, enabling students to discuss the full range of cultural forms, including film, television, popular literature, and music, as well as more canonical modes of culture such as opera, philosophy, art, and architecture.
Students will develop skills to appreciate, criticize, and understand culture through intellectual approaches. The module covers questions of cultural studies, representation, authorship, meaning, close reading, ideology, race, sexual difference, and psychoanalysis.
• Introduction to Cultural Analysis 2 (20 credits): This module introduces students to different methodological and critical approaches to the analysis and study of cultural production and consumption in a range of different social, historical, and political contexts.
Students will engage with relevant questions, topics, and themes relating to the critical and contextual analysis of culture and explore how culture itself informs its theoretical interpretation.

Year 2:

• Compulsory Modules:
• Practice [3] (20 credits):
This module builds on the achievements of the previous year as students take on their own studio in a shared communal studio space. The emphasis is on independent, self-directed, practice-based research and addressing questions of its dissemination, presentation, and audience. Students will develop their work supported by individual tutorials, group crits, and technical workshops that allow them to explore the processes and materiality available to realize their creative aspirations. They will work towards presenting their work in an open studio event and an exhibition.
• Practice [4] (40 credits): Working in small collaborative research clusters, students will develop a body of work that explores their ideas of audience in relation to appropriate methods of display for their work.
This module will be supported by individual tutorials and group crits, that continue to support their analytical approach to their own work and that of their colleagues.
• Optional Modules:
• Cinema and Culture (20 credits):
This module examines specific films and their remakes, enabling students to note cultural, social, and technological shifts over time, discuss the possibilities and challenges of transnational remakes, and consider wider questions of inter-, para- and metatextuality in 20th-century cinema and our postcinematic age. Students will engage with relevant discourses and make detailed analyses of screenings, readings, and terminologies. The module also dedicates time to develop writing and presentation skills. Taking its cue from Barthes' attentiveness to language, the module explores philosophical questions of thought, meaning, art, culture, and human relations. The module follows the arc of Barthes' work, from his structuralist phase to his later writing.
• The State of Utopia (20 credits): This module explores different ideal cities and model communities from the sixteenth century to the present day.
Students will trace the various forms utopianism has adopted since Thomas More, engaging with architecture, art, literature, politics, philosophy, sociology, women's studies, and religion. They will be encouraged to think critically and imaginatively about contemporary society and propose a theoretically informed utopia for the future. The study of dystopias will be an integral component of this module.
• Live Issues and Contemporary Art Practice (20 credits): This module considers how cultural theory and contemporary aesthetic practice critically engage with current social and political issues.
Focusing on two "live issues" for five weeks, students will be encouraged to focus on subjects that bear on what it might mean to be alive in the 21st century. Both issues will be framed with an appropriate theoretical framework that introduces students to the complexity of the topics being addressed. The "issues" focused on will vary to reflect recent works and current exhibitions.
• Bodies of Difference: Gender, Power and the Visual Arts (20 credits): This module explores feminist, postcolonial, and queer theories of the embodiment of gender, its performance, performativity, and representation in art and visual culture.
Students will address shifts in the representational schema of the woman's body by studying a range of feminist perspectives that offer a critical framework for thinking about the body, embodiment, and difference in its intersectional complexity. The module also covers theories and concepts vital to understanding the power and dynamics of gender and the body operative in art history and visual culture.
• Seeing in Asia (20 credits): This module explores the differences between seeing familiar objects and those from Asia, examining how cultural and historical values and standards shape the act of seeing and interpreting images.
Students will engage with wide-ranging historical and cultural examples drawn from a range of specialities from art to science.
• Showing Asia (20 credits): This module focuses on the historical practice of collecting and exhibiting Asian objects, both within and outside Asia.
Students will explore the history of engagements that displayed "Asian" cultures from the 19th century to today by exploring primary sources. They will analyze the interconnected ways through which political and social forces shape the access to and formation of knowledge of art in/of Asia.
• State of the Art: Contemporary Perspectives in Art, Science and Technology (20 credits): This module explores how art and curatorial practice can offer an investigative lens on scientific and technological innovation.
Students will engage with and challenge the logic of art as a medium for the communication of science and consider the collaborative potential within these fields and the reciprocal dialogue between artistic and scientific methods and practices. Through discussion of contemporary issues in art, science, and technology, students will be encouraged to critically reflect on the socio-political context of current debates and the ethical implications of their treatment in curated settings.

Year 3:

• Compulsory Modules:
• Practice [5] (20 credits):
This module consolidates ideas, theories, processes, and materials that make up students' individual creative practice. Students will be taught through individual tutorials with professional artists, curators, and writers, and group crits. They will make work for a group exhibition project set by their lead tutor, to be exhibited in The Project Space. By the end of the module, students will have gained advanced technical skills in their chosen media and a highly critical understanding of contemporary art practice and its history. They will continue to benefit from the Visiting Artist talks, and a program of surfacing skill workshops, talks, and projects. There will be additional opportunities for students to participate in technical workshops and field trips to contemporary art exhibitions and events.
• Practice, towards exhibition (40 credits): This module continues the development of research-driven creative practice to produce a highly consolidated body of work and apply critical skills to its presentation.
The focus is towards the public platform of the degree show exhibition. In addition to exhibiting, students will have the opportunity to volunteer on the curatorial organizing group and gain invaluable experience of planning and delivering a large-scale group exhibition. Students have full authorship of their degree show; they will apply their creative and professional skills to collaborate with fellow artists, engage with partner external agencies, sponsors, and the media, while being supported by specialist technicians, academic staff, and the University marketing team.
• Dissertation (40 credits): The dissertation aims to foster students' independent research and scholarship alongside their studio practice by identifying appropriate critical, historical, and theoretical frameworks for their chosen subject.
Students' projects are supported by a dedicated dissertation supervisor, who is aligned to their research interests.
• Optional Modules:
• From Trauma to Cultural Memory: The Unfinished Business of Representation and the Holocaust (20 credits):
This module addresses debates in literary, historiographical, and psychological theory about how witnesses provide testimony and how the legacy of the Holocaust is represented by historians, sociologists, writers, artists, and museums. Students will consider the continuing significance of this disaster in the larger context of European history and pay close attention to the voices and images of those who continue to live with a trauma that only psychological, analytical, and creative work can turn into memory.
• Cultural Diversity in Museum and Material Culture - Case Study (20 credits): This module examines how museums have integrated (or failed to do so) the artifacts of Jewish minorities in Europe and the USA.
Students will look at the historical reasons for the omission of Jewish culture from many museums and the particularities of the models adopted for Jewish museums and Jewish exhibits in ethnographic and local history contexts.
• Critical Approaches to Photography (20 credits): This module excavates the multiple layers of philosophical issues embedded in concepts such as "truth," "reality," and "mediation" in thinking about and writing about photographic images.
Students will engage with historical and cultural treatises about the medium and its property.
• Postcolonial Feminisms (20 credits): This module examines feminist theory and politics as they have developed in the context of decolonization.
Emphasis will fall on theoretical formulations concerning sexual difference and the social division of gender as these have been produced by women writing to or from former European colonies. Attention will also be given to questions posed by and for feminism within postcolonial metropoles.
• Movies, Migrants and Diasporas (20 credits): This module is dedicated to migration and diaspora in Europe as reflected in the cinema.
It introduces students to the work of filmmakers with, for example, German Turkish, Black or Asian British, Maghrebi French, Roma, or Jewish backgrounds, productions made by transnational Eastern European practitioners, and films about migration and diaspora created by non-migrant/diasporic writers and directors.

Assessment:

The program uses a combination of assessment methods, including studio work, essays, and exams, depending on the modules selected. Assessment is led by principles of relevance, fairness, and inclusivity, and the development of vital skills beyond university, such as problem-solving, adaptability, self-reliance, and reflexivity. Practice modules, across the three years of study, are assessed by the submission, at the end of each module, of a single PDF portfolio and supporting statement.

Teaching:

Learning and teaching are delivered within a collective community environment, where shared interests and aims can be explored to embrace an inclusive sense of belonging and ownership. Mutual support and collaboration are openly encouraged. Studio tutors are practicing artists, writers, and curators who are contributing to national and international exhibitions and publications. Their research informs and contextualizes students' learning and teaching. The course combines studio, exhibition, and curatorial work with traditional teaching and learning methods such as lectures, seminars, studio crits, tutorials, and workshops. Students will also have the chance to enhance their knowledge and learning by attending talks from nationally and internationally renowned visiting artists and creative practitioners, as well as attending exhibitions and conferences both on and off campus. Independent study is a vital element of this degree, allowing students to develop their creativity and build important skills in areas such as research, analysis, and interpretation. Students are encouraged to carry out small research projects, on their own or as part of a group. The final-year dissertation enables students to undertake substantial independent research in a topic of particular interest to them. Students will be taught by expert academics, from lecturers through to professors. They may also be taught by industry professionals with years of experience, as well as trained postgraduate researchers, connecting them to some of the brightest minds on campus.

Careers:

The program has a strong commitment to enhancing student employability and embedding transferable skills that are extendable into a range of careers. Graduates become ambitious and pioneering artists, curators, critics, journalists, and innovative initiators working across a wide range of creative fields. Many graduates combine careers as artists with work in education, museums, galleries, and art therapy. They have established new cultural enterprises, and others use their knowledge and skills to launch careers in fields including journalism, broadcasting, marketing, technology, business, or design. Graduates have gone on to postgraduate study, including fine art, curating, and museum studies, arts marketing, art and business, art and design PGCE, interactive design, gaming, animation, and art and ecology. Many have completed PhDs and are teaching in higher education institutions around the world. The School has an engaged research community made up of MA and PhD students working across fine art practices, art history, cultural studies, gallery, museum, and heritage studies. The School is dedicated to helping students achieve their career ambitions. Students will be able to work closely with exhibiting and research-active staff in the School to source opportunities to gain experience, develop their skills, and build networks. The optional Study Abroad or Year in Industry also offers opportunities to gain transferable skills, develop experience, and create strong working relationships.

Other:

• The program offers an exemplary Study Abroad program, enabling students to undertake formative and exciting year-long study in year three with partner universities all over the world.
Students can choose from an array of institutions and benefit from different approaches to art teaching and making, cultural experiences, and new friends.
• The program offers an exemplary Year in Industry program, leading to students successfully undertaking work-based placements locally and internationally, some of which have led to permanent full-time employment after graduation.
• The program introduces students to a range of essential skills workshops, talks, and presentations, with practical advice to support their thriving in the wider creative and artworld.