.svg?ext=.svg){kind=logo}
Welcome to the Master of Fine Art
Are you an artist, researcher, activist and/or cultural worker? Did you complete a Bachelor degree and are interested in eco-socio-cultural contexts? In this Master Fine Art you unfold, deepen and develop your cultural, societal and/or planetary participation and its possibilities. HKU Master of Arts opens up and invites a time and place for dialogue, meeting and relation. Our focus on the 'and' - and not on the ''either/or'', nor on the 'therefore' - is driven by the urgencies and gathering forces of ecological, social and political crises that pose an inescapable challenge for practitioners today. Together as a team we wish to learn to orient away from the vertical or horizontal, towards the spheric, away from the separated stance of the eye/mind towards the corporeal, the collective, the planetary. We are invested in the necessity of unocvering and addressing the problems, potentials and possibilities of our times, upholding and supporting creative forces that affirm, heal and sustain life.
Whatever we see and understand as ''cultures'' and ''natures'', these are not objective, neutral, value-free or indifferent notions. They are given, and the same time arise, disappear, mutate and change continuously, according to most diverse interests, factors, events and perspectives. The Master Fine Art supports artistic research practices that participate and play a constitutive role in how nature-cultures can contribute the flourishing in solidarity with each other and the hybrid societies of this world.
As a Fine Art Master student you experiment with artistic research approaches that are situated in eco-socio-political contexts, and you are sensitive and critical towards the affects and effects of your practices. Through our open and sustainable political collaboration and partnerships with a series of international and local cultural institutions, we work on and offer concrete possibilities for contact between the art academy and the art world. Our focus on engaged, close, transdisciplinary collaboration with most diverse institutional practices understands your artistic research practice(s) as a challenging and changing professional field, allowing you to (re-)position your practice in collaboration with emergent, moving and committed working contexts.
Concerned by the multitude, degree and range of planetary, colonial, societal, hierarchial and personal problems, we encourage collaboration that transcend individualism and the separation of disciplines by fostering the cooperation between education, scienes and cultures that are supportive, inclusive and creative.
In brief
- A two-year full-time English-taught Master's programme
- A deep exploration of contemporary art and its eco-socio-cultural domains
- Developing, communicating and sharing your position
- A focus on a processual dynamics between making, thinking and sharing
- Exploration of diverse, experimental and interrelated practices, such as inter-, cross- and transdisciplinarity, activism, commoning, community- and world building, etc.
- Artistic Research Graduation with extended research report
- Possible preparation for further research in the form of a PD, PhD, etc.
- International, program, colleagues and study environment, in a locally vivid and sustaining cultural network
- High quality education, awarded with the golden Medal by 'EW best studies 2022', elected from in total 2.273 BA and MA studies.
How do you know the Master of Fine Art is right for you?
The Master of Fine Art is the programme for you if:- you have a Bachelor Degree and/or work since several years as practitioner on Bachelor level
- you wish to contribute and/or have experience in the political domains of art making and enjoy to look critically at the eco-socio-political field of the arts, culture(s) and their affects and effects
- you like to experiment with and co-develop different approaches to art and it’s understanding and attend to the relations between things, gestures, plants, people, expressions, animals, clouds, technologies and practices through researching, improvising and learning by doing
- you wish to develop your artistic research practice in relation to the discourses and methodologies of the Master program and in collaboration with its support structures
- you work on your own practice in relation to the world: you seek to question and position yourself in, instead and against capitalist, extractive, colonial, racist, sexist, patriarchal, ableist, discriminatory, heteronormative, elitist, chronically unfair and unjust structures, and to try out, develop and integrate alternative agencies into your (understanding of) practice(s).
- your practices are generated through processes of relation, exchange, action, making, discussing, studying, researching and responding and understand creative work as socially, politically and environmentally sensitive and enactive.
- you are interested in and challenged by the institutional and politico-cultural context(s) in which you study and work
- you share your knowledge, sensibilities and ideas with others: you enjoy thinking together and through each other and collaborate with everyone and everything; you understand your practice as collective knowledge development in situated, time- and site-sensitive solidarity network of humans and non-humans alike
- your practice is a reorientation of and from the human and looks for relationality, reciprocity and enlivenment
- you engage in intergenerational thinking, conceive of legacies, references, soulmates, life and death as intra-connected and understand your practice not as knowledge production, but as a continuous, situated process of knowledge development; you can envision your developing relational practice(s) in further (eventually collective, inter- and/or transdisciplinary) research contexts, such as PD, PhD etc.