Call for applications: MFA programs in Sculpture, Painting, Media Arts, Conceptual & Contextual Practices

The Schools of Visual Arts, est. in 1754, is a state driven higher education. The three-year international MFA study program has four professional specializations: Sculpture, Painting, Media Arts, Conceptual & Contextual Practices. Guest teachers from abroad and an international faculty are the core components of the MFA program; Artistic research is a strategic priority at the institution and is monitored at the Institute for Art, Writing and Research, housing a number of PhD and postdoctoral students and offering courses in writing, art theory and research based practice. The Schools of Visual Arts offers an international environment with ongoing research based activities. Managing one of Scandinavia’s largest spaces for contemporary art, Kunsthalle Chalottenborg, the institution and its students has a natural interaction with the public through talk and exhibition programs, and each year in April and May the Kunsthalle houses the Academy’s MFA degree show. Workshop facilities in Ceramics, Construction, Wood, Plaster, 3D, Graphics, Painting and Colour, Video/film, Photography and Sound.

MFA programs

Sculpture: Prof. Martin Erik Andersen
Sculpture is a balancing act between thought and action. A field where the rules – historical and material – are forever being renegotiated. Sculpture is not a firmly fixed formal or aesthetic object that can simply be fine-tuned as one goes forward; it must constantly challenge its own fundamental nature, its reason for existing. The main object is to explore, strengthen and enhance the potential for artistic expression associated with sculpture and space. To promote experimentation, radical approaches and the sheer intensity of the students’ approach to the relationships between materiality, concept, sociality and work.

Media Arts: Prof. Angela Melitopoulos
The Media School investigates the specificity of media as a field in the arts and art more generally as an interdisciplinary field of research which embraces the ecology of the mind and the critical potential in techno-sciences, anthropology, philosophy, and other disciplines. We aim to invent a new toolbox for fostering experimental artistic practice—an assemblage—that goes beyond technical structures, creating a zone of connectivity and social relations between human and non-human actors. This aesthetic paradigm describes a political vector in the arts between micro-political, relational worlds and macro-political, cosmic universes

Conceptual and Contextual Practices: Prof. Carla Zaccagnini
The School of Conceptual and Contextual Practices is a new school initiated in September 2017. The main focus of the program is in challenging the positions from which we think and work. On the one hand, this means to question hegemonic readings of art, history, theory and territory, proposing alternative narratives from a non-Eurocentric, post-colonial, anti-imperialist, queer-feminist, anthropophagic perspective. On the other hand, it also means to disrupt the flow of decisions that lead from an idea to a finalized work and rethink the mechanisms through which it becomes public; questioning solutions that might be used by default, subverting the normalized order of thoughts, and suspecting any assumptions of what can result from artistic research.

Painting and Pictorial Practises: Prof. Ferdinand Ahm Krag
The School of Painting and Pictorial Practices is based on the following image understanding: before the image is considered a market object or contemplative object, it is considered in its doing. Whether it is an image on Instagram, a piece of Celtic ornamentation, a physical painting or a press image, these images are each in their way agent forms that create worlds—ie. an image is a fundamental form of doing, that establishes an affect, a context, a recipient relationship, a political misguidedness or an inner stirring of a spiritual nature. The relevant art pedagogical fundamental question for the school is as follow: How can we perceive and challenge the already existing forms of the image and, in this process, develop images that create worlds of new forms of doing?

More info: 
MFA program and specializations
Admission procedure