Curating Contemporary Art

The programme explores both the theory and practice of curating and programming. Through talks and lectures by visiting curators, readings, seminars and workshops, you will engage with topics informing contemporary curating, such as globalisation and migration, the digital and networked culture, urbanisation and use of space, and changing understandings of publics. Meanwhile, site visits offer insight into the complex and diverse range of spaces and places, galleries, museums and organisations in which curating and programming occurs.

You will learn to work collaboratively in peer groups on a live project brief set with an external partner. You will build skills in writing curatorial proposals, commission artists, designers and programmers and understand the role and value of project research and planning, presentation, mediation, and advocacy. In the final term, you will work in groups to curate a display of your project proposal and deliver a public-facing event, designed to generate audiences and critical debate.

Term 1

Curatorial Thinking (30 credits)

Curatorial Thinking introduces you to current and dominant positions and histories within curatorial studies, whilst exploring how the curatorial may be understood as a broader cultural phenomenon, as well as an approach to critically engaging with our contemporary moment. The aim of this unit is to develop your critical analytical skills, so you can establish your own understanding of what curating might mean as a practice, approach and way of thinking in and of our time. Taught through lectures, seminar discussion and the close reading of texts, assessed by a comparative textual analysis and thematic essay, the unit aims to develop your confidence in approaching theoretical texts and applying theory to the analysis of practice and vice versa.

Ecologies of Curating (15 credits)

Ecologies of Curating enables you to develop an understanding of the contemporary arts ecology, equipping you in the process with the skills to critically examine the inter-relation between curating, programming and the spaces and places in which contemporary art is generated, displayed, mediated and promoted. Focused on specific typologies of practice, organisations and platforms you will think through in groups how the conditions in which these exist determine and define what is produced and curated, and who for. The unit runs in parallel with unit 1, ‘Curatorial Thinking’, allowing a further insight to the relation between theory and practice.

You'll also take AcrossRCA (15 credits), which supports you in working across disciplines to use creative and critical thinking and practice and collaborative approaches to respond to urgent contemporary themes.

Term 2

Urgency of the Arts (15 credits)

In term 2, School of Arts & Humanities Master’s students will participate in a School-wide unit The Urgency of the Arts. In this unit we ask how arts and humanities research and practice can engage with our current socio-political climate, and how might it shape, be necessary and essential in contemporary cultural debates.

The unit introduces you to a diverse range of perspectives, approaches and methods relevant to contemporary practice and thought in the arts and humanities. The delivery, predominantly based on workshops and featuring specialist presentations by leading artists, aims to assist you in recognising, questioning, expanding, and reevaluating your own artistic practices and disciplinary assumptions. Through interactions with staff and students from across the School, as well as through a variety of methodological approaches, you will develop an understanding of the contemporary concerns that shape and influence artistic practice. You will be encouraged to reflect on these as a means to articulate the potential of your own work within the context of broad cultural landscapes and urgent cultural debates.

Curating in a Collaborative Context (30 credits)

Curating in a Collaborative Context aims to develop your research-based and practice-orientated curatorial skills of analysis, conceptualisation and communication through collaborative, group project work. Responding to a specific project brief set by an external partner arts organisation, you will work with your peers to develop a curatorial proposal to Shortlist / Feasibility Stage of sector standards for presentation and feedback to your external partner. The unit follows the stages of proposal development from analysis of the project brief, research into context of the brief, identifying curatorial and programming opportunities towards commissioning, context analysis, audience projection, visualisation and documentation, presentation and advocacy.

You'll also take the Core Skills unit (15 credits) supports you in advancing your academic and professional skills to aid the development of your personal projects at the RCA and beyond in your professional practice and career.

Term 3

Independent Research Project (60 credits)

The final unit provides you with the opportunity to curate a public display of a collaboratively created curatorial proposal and programme a public event that tests the ideas of the proposal. Aiming to extend your understanding of the relationship between critical reflection, practice and research, you will individually explore an element of your proposal through an extended piece of research.

This MA is delivered over 45 weeks.

AcrossRCA

At the RCA we are working – as artists, designers, architects, historians, writers and curators – within physical and digital worlds that are undergoing constant change, and defined by shifting complexities and interconnections. The 15-credit AcrossRCA unit supports you in working across disciplines to use creative and critical thinking and practice and collaborative approaches to respond to urgent contemporary themes.

The unit revolves around a set of thematic pillars that reflect key areas of flux, uncertainty and complexity that cut across local, global, individual and collective contexts today. Working in interdisciplinary collaborative groups, you will develop your thinking and reflections on a key issue, question or tension under the umbrella of a larger theme as you generate a creative response. The focus is on learning through the process of the collaborative development of an idea. Rather than aiming for a completed product, solution or concrete answer, AcrossRCA is about an openness to what is generated through experimentation, dialogue and reflexivity. What happens when we move across disciplinary borders and put the kinds of knowledge, experience and skills we each bring to the RCA into conversation with others?

This provides you with opportunities to:

• share and adapt approaches from your personal practices and/or discipline;
• collaborate with peers outside your programme;
• interrogate collaboration through experimenting with and reflecting on collaborative models and approaches, and thinking about what your practice means in relation to others;
• critically reflect on your responsibilities as a creative practitioner and the role of creative practice in making our understanding and experience of the world;
• position your practice and skills and what you bring to a team and larger context.

This engagement with perspectives and practices from across disciplines and across the College is designed to complement your disciplinary studies, feed back into your individual work, and provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.

Core Skills

The Core Skills unit (15 credits) supports you in advancing your academic and professional skills to aid the development of your personal projects at the RCA and beyond in your professional practice and career. The unit also supports you in moving from Term 1 to the independent work you will undertake in your IRP in Term 3, as an opportunity to more deeply and systematically develop and deploy select core skills related to your practice. The transferable academic and professional skills covered in this unit reflect those required of a postgraduate student, and are adapted by Schools and programmes according to specific disciplinary perspectives and requirements. The Core Skills complement the work you are undertaking in your programme units and underpins and elevates the development of your future direction. The Core Skills will focus on specific skills most relevant to your expanded discipline, which may come under areas including inclusive, critical, sustainable and ethical approaches, the networks of knowledge, practice and communication within which your work sits, and the positioning of your practice. Throughout, the unit emphasises how these skills are situated not only disciplinarily within art, design, architecture, communication and humanities practices, but also within larger contexts, inside and in the world beyond.

The unit is informed by the following three themes:

• Making Meaning: How does questioning and contextualising inform the development of your practice? This theme builds on skills in critical and creative thinking, reflective practice, navigating complexity and research.
• Making Together: How do we think and make in dialogue and collaboration with others? This theme encompasses skills such as inclusive, ethical and sustainable practice, and peer learning and building networks.
• Making Public: How is your work and practice positioned within larger ecologies? Exploration of this theme may include developing skills in engagement, communication, entrepreneurship and leadership.

2021 Graduate Projects

Visit the CCA Graduate Projects 2021 portal.

Furtherfield, We are just animals, humans, and machines getting on together in specific lifeworlds

Gasworks, Fulfilment Services Ltd.

Camden Art Centre, In the meantime…

British Library, Notes on Play

Gasworks, Hear the Light

2020 Graduate Projects

Visit the CCA Graduate Projects 2020 portal.

Empathy Loading

So remember the liquid ground

Nothing gentle will remain

Sets and Scenarios

Quincunx

2019 Graduate Projects

Gasworks

Nottingham Contemporary

Photographers’ Gallery

Pump House Gallery

Fragmented Folies

For the time being

Unexpected beautiful phrase

Re over everything which exists under sky

2018 Graduate Projects

LUX Partnership, 4717

Gasworks Partnership, Who cares? A radio tale

Stanhope Partnership, Every Second In Between

The Design Museum partnership, Alt-Age: Designing Belief

2017 Graduate Projects

Doing It In Public

Itinerant Assembly

Open House

Turn The Tide

Read the CCA Graduate Projects 2017 press release.