September 9–12, 2021
Grange Road, Kingston upon Thames
Kingston School of Art
London KT1 2QJ
United Kingdom
Kingston School of Art is pleased to present a selection of projects by this year’s graduating students from the MFA Fine Art program.
After a challenging year, students began to re-occupy and re-activate their studio spaces in the spring. First, with a series of projects entitled “The Visitor,” which took place on a dedicated website and across Instagram. Then, as restrictions eased, a physical degree show was staged in the program’s unique Swan Studios (a former public house) from September 9 to 12, 2021, and finally, Kingston School of Art published its Postgraduate Online Showcase on September 23, 2021.
Against the backdrop of a global pandemic and the health and social crisis it has precipitated, students have had to develop and maintain practices, while considering what effects these unprecedented events would have on the global ecology and economy of the contemporary art world. Everything changed and continues to change, and old certainties are no longer. Work generated at home and in temporary studios was transported back into the institutional spaces of the university in preparation for a degree show.
The students’ work explores themes of the environment, ritual and painting, cultural memory and the digital image, obsession and the habitual, nation states and history, and language and its limits. The intensity and solitary nature of working from home is reflected in much of the work produced this year and has resulted in an extraordinarily resilient cohort. After relearning how to collaborate, and rethinking the very idea of an exhibition, the students have produced a series of projects at once reflective and outward looking, in a spirit of solidarity, community and defiance.
The physical exhibition at Swan Studios was accompanied by a series of events organized in collaboration with Kingston School of Art’s Contemporary Art Research Centre (CARC), including an exhibition review with Professor Elizabeth Price.
The MFA in Fine Art at Kingston School of Art offers a unique blend of studio and theoretical training. On the programme students develop their practice while critically reflecting on and locating that practice within a changing social, political and cultural context. Students have the opportunity of taking one art theory module with the world-renowned Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), while working across a range of media, taking advantage of the school’s new cutting-edge workshops.
The Contemporary Art Research Centre (CARC) builds and provides an intellectual and creative milieu for innovation in contemporary fine art practices. Drawing on a legacy of the radical imagination and conceptual practices, CARC imagines and enacts new possibilities for art with respect to the social sphere, technology, models of knowledge and modes of experience.
