Department of Visual Cultures
Designed for students who are interested in critical approaches to the impact of globalisation, migration and the international circulation of Visual Culture. This includes an understanding of how art exhibitions respond to issues of globalisation, how activism and critical practices intervene through the arts and their institutions, and how post-colonial experience and theory have moved from geographical margins to cultural centers. Our arena of study is critically positioned in the aftermath of anti-colonial struggles for liberation and of their concurrent processes of self-constitution. On the other hand, it considers the demands of the market to produce cultural references that signify clearly across the globe. In dialogue with these tensions, this program begins to map out how, in the twenty-first century, creative practices constitute new realities within globalisation.
What do you study?
MA Global Arts is made up of a five-week core course and two Special Subjects. Additionally, there are collaborative research projects and short residencies at international, affiliated institutions. The taught part of the programme enables you to identify and prepare the area of independent research you will carry out in your dissertation.
1. The core course has two strands and considers the writings of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatry Spivak, Trinh T. Minh-Ha and others, and strengthens students‘ understanding of the salient theories and concepts that inform the field of Global Visual Cultures.
2. Special subjects are 15 weeks, in-depth-taught courses based on the current research interests of staff. They enable you to focus on an aspect of contemporary art, cultural theory or contemporary thought that particularly interests you.
Compulsory Special Subject: Geographies, Irit Rogoff, Simon Harvey
This course engages with an expanded notion of the geographic, specifically the shift from classical post-colonial geography to issues of contemporary cartography. Drawing on key theoretical texts and the works of artists, architects, curators, activists, and philosophers, it explores such issues as urbanity, globalisation, mobility, conflict, migration, citizenship as well as critical concepts as governance, smuggling, informal economies and counter cartography.
Additional subjects:
Affiliations, Jean-Paul Martinon
Who are we? How do we affiliate ourselves? How are art, space and time conceived in this respect? Drawing on Sub-Saharan African philosophy, art and culture, this course radically challenges dominant western Universalist responses to these questions.
Conflict and Negotiations as Spatial Practices, Paulo Tavares (with Eyal Weizman, Susan Schuppli)
Key concepts explored include ‘space/event,’ flows, bio-politics, crisis, resistance, the figure of the refugee and its emergent geography of extra-territoriality.
Dissonant Images and Questions of Evidence, Nicole Wolf
Drawing on the histories and theories of political filmmaking from around the world, this course asks how artistic experimentation with the documentary form relates to, and produces new constitutions of the evidential, the political and ultimately the judicial.
Transcultural Memory, Astrid Schmetterling
This course focuses on questions of memory, placing particular emphasis on the encounter of different histories and remembrances across cultures and explores spaces where memories neither compete with nor erase each other, but interact in productive, unforeseen ways.
Transforming Critical Practices (Laboratory), Helge Mooshammer, Peter Mörtenbock
An experimental environment to explore different ways of integrating and critically transforming the experience of the MA into one‘s own practice of research, writing, curating, artistic and cultural work.
Entrance requirements
You should normally have, or expect to gain, an undergraduate degree of at least second-class standard in humanities or social sciences including art history, fine art, studio-based practice, arts administration and related activities. On occasion, applicants with degree-equivalence of professional practice may be considered for admission.
Application
Please visit www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/apply to download an application form. Application forms are also available from, and should be returned to, the Admissions Office at Goldsmiths, London University.
Applications welcome for 2013–14 entry by 30 June 2013.
For additional information, please contact Professor Irit Rogoff, [email protected].
