The first year of the curatorial, public and visual cultures major is incorporated into a School of Arts interdisciplinary course, which is called Film, Visual and Performing Arts (FVPA). Studied over two semesters, this course introduces students to key theories and concepts in the disciplines of Curatorial, Public and Visual Cultures, Digital Arts, Drama, Film, Music and Visual Arts and enables critical understandings of culture in everyday life.
Drawing on case studies from the different disciplines, the first semester focuses on questions of representation, contexts and conventions. The second semester explores two overarching and connected themes, ‘stereotypes and power’ and ‘the body, sex and race’.
Second year is focused more specifically on the discipline of Curatorial, Public and Visual Cultures. Visual analysis and critique are the foundation of two semester-long courses orientated around ‘thinking through time’. The first course is an introduction to three of the oldest image-making conventions in art history – landscape, figure and portrait – from ancient to contemporary practice. The second course is an introduction to the curatorial practices and exhibition histories that have shaped different concepts of modernity and modernism from the nineteenth century to the present.
HART2003 and HART 2004 IIB
At the second-year level the curriculum is divided into two semesters.
Semester one: Portrait/Landscape
The first semester Portrait/Landscape interrogates these subjects/genres in terms of their deep-rooted histories and conventions and the ways in which these have both persisted and been challenged. The first semester has a strong focus on visual analysis skills including description and socio-political contextual analysis and interpretation. Portraits and Landscapes are never simply objective documents modelled directly from reality. They are intricately tied up with relations of power and the course starts from the premise that most art forms are informed by, if not directly driven by, those who wield power in their own social groups, but can also be seen to work to critique, invert and subvert those power relations in various ways. These issues have been applied to examples across time and place including Ancient Egypt, South America, West Africa, Europe and America.
Semester Two: Art Historical Modernisms/Modernisms and the Global South.
The second semester is divided into two distinct quarters and the first provides an introduction and a critique of art historical modernism, rooted in Europe in the mid-late 19thC. This course aligns the development of industrialisation and modernism/modernist production with the age of colonisation. This European focus is important to establish the discourse of binaries and primitivism that still casts long shadows in the present moment. The quarter ends with discussion of post modernism and the problems with the term ‘post’. The second quarter of this semester is focused on modernisms and the Global South and expands the understanding and knowledge of modernism into a realm of multiple modernisms that presents a broader, and more contemporary, view than the art of 19thC Europe. Usually this quarter is focused on African, African-American and/or South American artistic practices. There is potential for it to include artists and movements from other Global South countries in future.
YEAR 3 – Curatorial, Public and Visual Cultures III
Third year focuses on ‘thinking through methods’ in four quarter-length courses. The first course introduces different art historical methods and theories. The second course introduces a critical framework for understanding archival, curatorial and exhibition practice, while the third course engages concepts of Africa, explored particularly through the relationship between art and artefact. Finally, the fourth course examines contemporary art practice in the context of postmodern and postcolonial theory.
HART IIIA: ART HISTORICAL METHODOLOGIES (HART 3005)
This module is broadly focused on art historical methods and methodologies.
Though not always explicit, the ways in which art objects are analysed and written about are entrenched in discursive and ideological positions, ways of knowing and broader sociological frameworks. In analysing and understanding methodologies we are able to challenge and unlearn inherited ideologies and begin to write new art histories from here.
HART IIIB: CONTEXT AND DISPLAY (HART 3006)
Focusing primarily on the circulation and reception of art in the public domain, this module examines how different contexts, within which art gets encountered, become critical ‘sites’ of value making. These contexts, argued here as art events, exhibitions and site-specific interventions (all of which speak to different forms of display), in different social and political milieu, enable various kinds of artistic and institutional critique. They enable an understanding of how the arts economy and its systems influence the environment from which art and the public meet. Engaging notions of the curatorial and the archive, this module attempts to explore the workings of different contexts and displays, particularly how these ‘sites’ are part of the construction of ‘art history’.
HART IIIC: CONSTRUCTIONS OF AFRICA | Art/Artefact (HART 3007)
This course examines the dialectics often imposed between cultural material objects and artworks - with an aim to encourage students to think critically about how ‘artworks’ can carry metaphorical, symbolic and conceptual significance that offer a deeper understanding of artistic intentions and their evolving contemporary meaning.
HART IIID: READING THE CONTEMPORARY (currently taught by staff from the Fine Arts department)
The theoretical framework for this course includes colonial/decolonial/postcolonial, modernism/ postmodernisms. It emphasizes situated and decolonial modes of critique and methods of close reading, introducing students to a range of contemporary forms of writing, and transmedial visual, sonic, filmic, and print practices. Students consider manifestos, photographic theory, reviews, interviews, conversations and listening as production.
