MFA ZHdK: Call for applications 2019/2020

Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) is one of the most progressive art schools in Europe, with 2,800 enrolled students. Its diverse range of degree and research programs include fine arts, design, film, music, dance, theater, art education, media, and transdisciplinary studies.

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

You will be given the opportunity to develop and expand your network by being brought into contact with interesting figures from the field of local and global contemporary culture within the vibrant environment of ZHdK, the city of Zurich, Switzerland, and the international art scene.

As you integrate into a large body of international students, you will be encouraged early on to cluster in smaller groups and seminar groups courses—sometimes guided by one or more tutors and sometimes convoked through a process of self-organization coordinated by you and other students. Your artistic practice is at the core of your studies.

Starting from your initial activities (formal, conceptual), you will be invited to join challenging workshops in order to gain experience of the potential of different materials and media. Well-equipped workshops 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, block-chain and non-monetary forms of dependency, molecular aesthetics, artistic research, and the wise fool that every artist might be. 

The program comprises supervised and individual projects, lectures, seminars, group tutorials, and study trips to international venues related to artistic production and discussion. In autumn 2019 the MA students will have the opportunity to visit Venice and the 58th Biennale, together with Pauline Boudry, co-signing the Swiss Pavilion with Renate Lorenz. Furthermore, ZHdK is the initiator of a Global Shared Campus with active international exchange programs, in particular with various partners from other art universities in East and South East Asia.

Your artistic practice, which may be studio based or extend into a post-studio dimension and is shaped by a multiplicity of analogue and digital media within the current paradigm of the post-internet era, will be presented on different occasions—possibly at RETA, the student-run MA Fine Arts exhibition program, and ultimately at the final degree show, which represents the culmination of your studies after either two or three academic years, according to your preference.

Faculty: Donatella Bernardi, Christian Hübler, Dominique Lämmli, Uriel Orlow, Gerald Raunig, Christoph Schenker, Erik Steinbrecher, Yvonne Wilhelm

Visiting faculty and guests, 2018/19: Sabian Baumann, Pauline Boudry, Mathieu Copeland, Gioia Dal Molin, Jörg Heiser, Elise Lammer, Quinn Latimer, Samuel Leuenberger, Jonas Lund, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Leila Peacock, Elodie Pong, Dorothee Richter, Rory Rowan, Hinrich Sachs, Nadia Schneider Willen, Barbara Seiler

Director MFA: Donatella Bernardi
Director Department of Art & Media: Swetlana Heger

Registration and portfolio submission from January 8 to February 24, 2019

Further information
Admission requirements and registration application
ZHdK MA Fine Arts website

Contact
master.finearts [​at​] zhdk.ch