Since 2004, Transart has led innovative, low-residency, transdisciplinary, international creative research programs. Designed and run entirely by artists, the Institute offers practice-based PhD and MFA programs, generating space for experimentation and radical thinking in every form.
Practice PhD & one-year MFA pre-flight Scholarships
Early admissions deadline: November 15. The Institute is awarding early applicants a three-month jump on their studies. With a dedicated advisor, as early as February, you may refine your proposal, develop critical vocabulary, gain access to advanced readings to pace yourself and create relationships with current students, faculty and incoming peers. You will be encouraged to participate in a creative research crash course, meet monthly with your advisor for detailed feedback on your work and have regular discussions with your peer critique group. Additionally, you may attend a micro-residency in Nairobi with our current MFA and PhD researchers in January.
More information about Admissions and Pre-flight Scholarships. Sign up for MFA/PhD info sessions.
Open Window Events are a series of online public talks on the last weekend of every month. Events aim to give alums and the public a moment to connect with the Institute’s internal, topic-based intensive sessions.
Emotional Landscapes: Construction of a Spatial Imaginary
Saturday, November 25, 2023, 3–4pm UTC
With Diogo Passarinho
Diogo Passarinho gives attention to artists’ practices and how the spatial setup in which artworks are presented can further explain their intentions, always seen through the lens of the viewers’ personal perspectives and past memories.
Art, Theory, and a community of Artists and Thinkers are the mediums the studio uses to explore and develop what we call “emotional landscapes.” This lecture will be about how we can try to design spaces that live in our memories and most likely will outlive the short life expectancies of some projects. Something you saw as a child, read in a book, listened to in a club, or caught in a movie is most likely to be used as an abstract reference and starting point to develop a space.
Confusion, Disorientation, Control, Love, Ambiguity, Climax, and Desperation are probably narratives that you will encounter in one of the studio’s projects, and our goal is, together with different practitioners, to try to increase the lexicon of feelings we can use and explore. Whether the task is to develop a spatial installation for one video or to design a space for 70 artists, the premise is always the same: identifying what we want the audience to feel and what memories they will bring home.
D_P_S is a research-based design studio founded in 2015 by Diogo Passarinho, investigating how emotional contexts can be brought into shaping spatial memories. The work of the studio has been showcased at the Venice Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, Baltic Triennial, Hayward Gallery, Palais De Tokyo, Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Oslo National Museum, Van Abbemuseum, to name a few examples.
See D_P_S website, and register to attend.
Creative Nonfiction and the Genre of the Thesis
Sunday, November 26, 2023, 12–1am UTC
With Robyn Ferrell
This public talk looks at how writing techniques taken from creative nonfiction might help construct a thesis that is sympathetic to creative research but which, at the same time, meets the genre demands of academic submissions. It looks at how one can use biographical and personal material alongside reportage and analysis to produce a compelling and vibrant accompaniment to the creative project.
Robyn Ferrell is an honorary professor of cultural studies at Sydney University, a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and a member of the Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide.
After beginning as a journalist for The Sydney Morning Herald, Robyn Ferrell completed a PhD in philosophy. She has taught aesthetics, cultural studies and creative writing at several Australian universities, including Macquarie University and Melbourne University.
A one-time recipient of the Australia Council Nancy Keesing Studio in the Cité des Arts in Paris, she has received several writing and Australian Research Council grants for research into Indigenous art and other projects. With an extensive publication list of books and articles, including philosophy, creative nonfiction and journalism, Ferrell’s newly published novel is Private Language (Chook Raffle Press, 2023).
Read more by Robyn, and register to attend.
