Location:

Dun Laoghaire, Ireland

Program Type:

Full Degree

Degree Level:

Master

Specialty:

Fine Art

Program Overview

Program Description:

This Masters of Arts programme is based in the centre of Dublin, and encompasses pathways in art-making, criticism and curating. The programme begins in January and can be completed in either a 12 or 24 month period. The MA in Visual Arts Practices (MAVIS) emphasizes the importance of real-world learning experience and offers a combination of taught lectures (on modules such as Visual Cultural Research, Contemporary Art Practices, Curatorial Seminar and Research Methods in Practice) together with tutorials, critiques, seminars, workshops and independent study. It provides students with an opportunity to build and expand their professional networks through a high profile visiting lecturer programme, a regular symposium and two international study trips. Students are also invited to develop work for a research collaboration event, which opens to the public. During their time on MAVIS, students extend their practice by examining a range of validating contexts within which their work is understood. A key aim of the programme is to ensure that research becomes an intentional rather than an assumed activity and students are encouraged to contextualize rather than theorize their practice. Each year new learning opportunities are explored through international study trips. This year MAVIS students visited exhibitions, attended talks and conducted studio visits in Belgium and the Netherlands, and later in 2010 they will attend the preview of the Manifesta Biennial in Murcia, southern Spain. MAVIS is open to a diverse range of practices, with past and current students working in areas such as public art commissioning, performance, photography, criticism, sculpture, video installation, curating and painting. The programme also provides an opportunity to develop and explore hybrid practices incorporating art-making, writing and curating. Each student will determine the nature of their own pathway-specific, project work. It is loosely assumed that: * A student specialising in the art-making pathway will primarily make artworks and consider how and under what circumstances viewers will be asked to see / experience the work. Art-making is not just understood here as the production of objects and images but will also extend to many other types of activity. * A student specialising in the curation pathway will organise situations where audiences come into contact with artworks of some form or other. Curation is not just the co-ordination and care of exhibits in a gallery and students on this pathway must determine what an appropriate and / or personally relevant curatorial project is. * A student specialising in criticism will primarily create materials (essays, publications, audio recordings, visual essays, documentary projects) that facilitate or promote a relationship between an audience and an artwork or artworks. Criticism is not just the writing of academic texts but can extend to any form of considered mediation | evaluation | education | response to an artwork or an artworld or an art institution.

Additional Program Information

Accreditation:

Accredited Institute