TRANS– Art, education, engagement MA in Visual Arts

TRANS—, a Master’s program in Visual Arts at HEAD—Genève, welcomes students who are willing to engage their own art practice in collaborative processes with social and/or educational partners (schools, community houses, health institutions, associations supporting migrant people…), as well as gallery education practices (involve different groups in a critical relationship with art institutions). 

The teaching team—coordinated by the artists collective microsillons—and the guest artists, curators and educators, accompany the students in a reflection on collaborative art production, on the questions of address and reception and on art as a possible tool for institutional or social transformation. 

Within this framework, transpedagogy—blending art and education in order to create innovative forms of knowledge production and exchange—is taught and applied.

At the very core of the curriculum, TRANS— sets up a three-semester long collective and collaborative project that involves the students along with cultural and social actors. This nucleus creates a shared workspace that is articulated with seminars and collective student-led reading sessions. 

This pedagogical structure is built on close relationships with the students’ own practices. It aims to foster a conscious, ethical and problematized approach of artistic work in a social context, based on alternative, critical and feminist pedagogies in particular. The participants are directly involved in the different steps of the conception, development and documentation of the program’s activities. A sense of hospitality and a spirit of sharing is part of the everyday of the TRANS– Master community.

In order to broaden intellectual and professional perspectives, TRANS— invites international guests, artists or researchers in the field of socially engaged art practices and of critical gallery education, such as Bureau d’études, Marie-Antoinette Chiarenza, Neil Cummings, David Cross, Dias&Riedweg, Ruben Gastambide, Janna Graham, Pablo Helguera, Myriam Lefkowitz, Olivier Marboeuf, Mathieu Menghini, Carmen Mörsch, Nils Norman, Nicolás Paris, Bea Schlingelhoff, Nora Sternfeld, Claude-Hubert Tatot or Wochenklausur.

TRANS— proposes different forms of public address (projects, open seminars, un-conferences, meetings, etc.) to open the frame for discussion about the role of artists in society. The program also engages the students in public conferences on socially engaged art practices and radical education in international contexts. TRANS— program offers professional perspectives in critical gallery education, artistic intervention in formal or informal educational contexts and art practices in social contexts.