Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Study Details: One year full-time (45 weeks)
MA Culture, Criticism and Curation is a course directed towards critical thinking, research, and practice in the fields of culture, curation, art, design, and creative production. To equip practitioners with tools that will enable them to actively find their way through a variety of institutional and cultural situations, the Course offers an overview of cultural history and curatorial theory alongside opportunities to acquire skills in research, writing, curating and production.
On this Course we address the present moment and pressing questions faced by cultural producers, policy makers, curators, artists, and researchers. Approached through interdisciplinary and intercultural enquiry, you will learn to engage with the in-between places where new knowledge is developed via an integration of theory and practice. Throughout the Course, we explore with you the ways in which culture, criticism and curation can contribute to change.
The curator is positioned as a figure able to act intentionally, bring in agency and make change across a variety of contexts. Curating makes meaning and contributes new, critical perspectives on existing scenarios. The Course asks you to think reflectively – with others – about the forms that art and culture take, identify where and how hegemonies develop, keep hold and challenge them.
The Course prioritises interrelations between people as well as ideas and objects, and will help you develop your capacity to collaborate and to work across different networks of practitioners, organisations, and audiences.
We encourage you to test and engage with emerging digital technologies to undertake research, experiment with forms, and collaborate equitably.
We select applicants according to potential and current ability in the following areas:
Graduates from MA Culture, Criticism and Curation progress onto careers across the cultural sector. The course prepares graduates to work in a range of different professional contexts, including cultural institutions, museums, galleries, multi-arts centres, publishing organisations, and community-oriented initiatives. You will also gain the skills to work as an independent or freelance practitioner with the adaptability to move between professional contexts, and to pitch compelling creative projects.
Graduates have proven successful in developing careers focused different aspects of curatorial work, from exhibition-making, to programming live events and performances, to commissioning to work from contemporary practitioners, to working with archives and collections. Graduates also often have an interest in developing careers as writers, editors and researchers, leading to work in art writing, journalism, criticism, and publishing, as well as doctoral study.
The course provides students with critical and analytical capabilities, expertise in visual thinking, writing skills, and the ability to work across practices and disciplines, whether individually or collaboratively. Crucially, students graduate with hands-on experience of developing and realising live curatorial projects in partnership with external cultural organisations. Students and recent graduates also benefit from UAL careers and employability service, which offers professional development and support.
MA CCC promotes a community of practice which is central to students’ development. The Course offers a space for you to develop independent research and practice and a framework for student-led learning. In our vision, theory and practice work hand in hand within curatorial work, and we explore the different relationships between these two modes of knowledge production.
Culture is studied through lectures, seminars, tutorial groups and reading groups. The curriculum is responsive to changing interests and priorities. Often interdisciplinary, the Course encourages an integrated approach to critical, practical, peer-to-peer, group and independent work. Events at programme, college and university level encourage students to engage with a wider culture of research and innovation and connect with others using curatorial thinking and the practice you are developing.
The main independent work over the 45 weeks of study includes a Dissertation and a group curatorial project. The Dissertation helps you deepen your knowledge in an area of your choice. The group project offers an opportunity to develop your curatorial practice in partnership with an external organisation.
Students learn to engage with and develop both group and individual practices.
Working collaboratively with organisations – small and large, independent, and well-established – offers students significant professional experience within the curriculum, leading to work that is supported to be experimental and ambitious. Previous examples of external partnerships include The Guardian, vFd Dalston, Flat Time House, NEoN Festival, David Roberts Art Foundation, South London Gallery, Institute of Digital Fashion, Tate Exchange, Liverpool Biennial, Centre for Investigative Journalism, The Common Room and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. The Course has two ongoing collaborative projects, Project Credit (https://project.credit/) and UQ Journal (https://uqjournal.net/).
Unit 1 is the entry point to the Course and is a composed of a series of intensive workshops, seminars and discussions that set the base for curatorial thought – that is, thought that emphasises the interrelations between disciplines, cultures and knowledges. You will learn how to respond to a brief and this will help you find your creative and critical entry points into the course. Key themes of the Unit are experimentation, inter-cultural exchange and conversation within the cohort.
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