BA (Hons) Curating

What you'll study Year 1 (core level 4)

You take the following core modules:

Year 1 core modules Module title Credits. Modernities Modernities 30 credits

This module provides a historical preface for the whole of your degree studies, which centre on modern and contemporary art and visual culture. How has the concept of modernity arisen, and how has its meaning varied and evolved in recent history, in terms of art, ideas, events and technological change?

30 credits. Curating and the Public Sphere Curating and the Public Sphere 30 credits

This module provides an introduction to curating that is grounded in modern and contemporary ideas of the public, exploring both how galleries and museums conceptualise their public role, but also the proliferation of artistic and curatorial activities that have moved beyond the gallery: from the streets, to libraries, parks, care homes, to the internet, social justice organisations, festivals and and schools. Students will begin to map their own interests in this expanded field of curating.

30 credits. Artefacts and Histories Artefacts and Histories 30 credits

This module is an introduction to various ways in which artists, curators and communities have dealt with material artefacts in response to changing social and political conditions. Through visits to archives and repositories of art and other artefacts, students will be introduced to the various ways in which such objects have been thought and organised.

30 credits.

You also choose one option module from the following list:

Year 1 option modules Module title Credits. Seeing and Showing Seeing and Showing 30 credits


In what senses may the meaning and effect of a work depend on the way we see it, and what factors are in play, in terms of subjectivity, exhibition, aesthetic ideas, and concepts of realism?

30 credits. Space and Time Space and Time 30 credits

How have space and time and their interaction come to play a central part in modern and contemporary visual practices? We consider the question under different headings: the photographic instant, memory, the present time of everyday experience, and imaginary dimensions of space and time.

30 credits. Beyond Boundaries Beyond Boundaries 30 credits

Contemporary art has gone beyond the limits of traditional practice. How and why has this come about? How do we make sense of and evaluate these innovations in our field of study?

30 credits. Year 2 (credit level 5)

In your second year, you will study the following core modules:

Year 2 core modules Module title Credits. Museums, Galleries, Exhibitions Museums, Galleries, Exhibitions 30 credits

From the cabinet of curiosities to the museum without walls. Two modules explore the philosophical foundations of museums – and how can they can be critiqued. They examine the movement of the museum from an object-centred educational institution to an idea-oriented site for the production of experiences. Case studies include: The Louvre, the British Museum, Sir John Soane’s Museum, The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art and Charles Wilson Peale’s Museum and others.

30 credits. Curating after the Educational Turn Curating after the Educational Turn 30 credits

As museums and galleries move into the realm of idea-driven experiences artists and curators have re-visited the question of education, breaking down traditional hierarchies, setting up schools and placing their work in direct encounter with publics. How does this moment differ from past artistic engagements with the educational field? How have arts and other organisations responded to this ‘turn’ and what new terrains for practicing art and curating have opened up? Students will have the opportunity to investigate the possibilities of their own curatorial proposals.

30 credits.

You will also choose four option modules from the Department of Visual Cultures.

Year 3 (credit level 6)

In Year 3 you will complete a dissertation and study the following compulsory module:

Module title Credits. Curating the Contemporary Curating the Contemporary 30 credits

A group project is undertaken with London-based public-sector partners. It involves curating an exhibition or public intervention based on the exploration of a theme or issue of interest. Throughout the project you will develop valuable skills in planning, programming, publicising, and exhibiting the project alongside the development of conceptual framework and writing around the project.

30 credits.

You will also choose two special subjects. Options include:

Module title Credits. The Truth in Painting The Truth in Painting 30 credits

Cezanne promised Emile Bernard that he would tell him “the truth of painting,” adding that this was something he owed him. This promise of the truth seems to imply that painting has something akin to a philosophical or ethical dimension. The module will be concerned with examining the points at which painting and philosophy come into contact. You consider several broad themes concerning spectatorship, optics, the theorising of practice, problems of explanation and interpretation, and the relationship between painting and language.

30 credits. Sexual Poetics Sexual Poetics 30 credits

Terms such as sex, gender, sexuality, and sexual difference now frequent in visual culture, yet they stem from divergent theoretical trajectories. This module reflects upon some of these past and future paths. We specifically focus on new ways of thinking and visualising kinship, taking into account both long-standing feminist investment in this category and recent work on technology, post-humanism and the ‘animal question’. Donna Haraway’s work – from the ‘cyborg’ to ‘companion species’ manifesto – is thus central to the module. Kinship relations link with questions of who, what and how we eat – both literally and symbolically. The impact of new technologies on both who, and what, we call kin and who, ow what, we are addressed through the writings of Freud, Jacques Derrida, Cary Wolfe, Judith Roof and others. All aspects are discussed in relation to a wide range of visual culture eg films by Jonathan Demme; plays by Caryl Churchill; art by the Tissue Culture & Art Project.

30 credits. Philosophy and... Philosophy and... 30 credits

This module introduces you to philosophical and conceptual reflection in relation to a number of artistic expressions such as literature, music, cinema, photography and painting. Several questions will be explored, including:

a) can a philosopher write about a specific art form in the way in which he can write about any other subject or about any other art form?
b) how does the relation to art and a specific art form change when it is determined conceptually?
c) how is philosophical reflection affected by the tendency of the arts to blur the demarcating lines that run between them?

Our reading list includes work by Jean-Luc Nancy, Theodor W Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault.

30 credits. Film Fables Film Fables 15 credits

Film Fables explores documentary practice and language not as a genre but as varied instantiations of the political, as critique and proposition. With this approach we will explore documentary’s experimentations with actuality to produce versions of reality and the real, often through modes of fiction and fabulation. We will first address how historical moments of radical socio-political transformation have provoked new documentary forms and what understanding of change, revolution, the political voice, the address of the spectator/ citizen and cinematic pedagogy were created hereby. This is accompanied by thinking with and through documentary research practices such as observation, ethnography, conversation/ interview or militant/ intervention, leading to essayistic, performative, educational, militant or first person modalities.

Theorizations of the political and political fiction will be linked to singular formulations of political cinema through e.g. anti-colonial and feminist movements globally and we will ask how these impact our current thinking through the relation between cinema and our political being in the world. We will link historical markers to recent audio-visual practices, which respond critically to social, political and audio-visual forms of governmentality defining our contemporary moment. Examples will include diverse global perspectives and those circulating within and across art, cinema and activist context.

Throughout the course we will explore documentary practices ourselves through small filmmaking exercises and a group fieldtrip.

15 credits. Archive and Spectacle Archive and Spectacle 15 credits

Two paradigms that have emerged in recent decades for thinking through the multifarious facets of display are archive and spectacle. These two paradigms - and their complex intertwining - express the mechanism by which a thing is attributed a value and/or made visible through, perhaps inevitably, the exercise of power. At stake between archive and spectacle is thus the question of representation – representation as the experience of visibility or display, the practice of making something visible, particularly in the curatorial sense, and the condition that dictates the limits of what visibility constitutes.

This module stages an intense engagement with the concepts archive and spectacle and a reflection on how as theoretical constructs they may implicate and inform contemporary exhibitionary- and collections-based practices.

15 credits. Animating Architecture Animating Architecture 30 credits

This module considers significant changes in architecture, design and the built environment since the mid-1930s, providing an overview of how such changes have been understood and recorded. An assessment of the literary forms of architectural history as a discipline will show how other forms of narrative may be used to attribute different forms of significance to particular buildings, spaces and the reputations of their designers. You will look at examples of cinema, installation art, video and performance art to show how architecture may be otherwise represented and explored.

30 credits. Popular Modernism Popular Modernism 15 credits

This module will offer a new angle on the debates about modernism and postmodernism. It will posit the concept of popular modernism as an alternative both to “high” modernism and to post-modernism. It will show that, especially during the period 1950-1985, many techniques and approaches pioneered in modernism were not only disseminated, but extended and transformed in popular contexts. The module will therefore explore connections, lines of influence and resonances coming out of theory, visual art, literature, music, film, and television. It will also analyse the political, economic and culture infrastructure that allowed popular modernism to emerge, focusing for instance on the role of art schools, paperback publishing and public service broadcasting in opening up a circuit whereby the avant-garde could connect with the popular. Key figures discussed will include Alfred Hitchcock, Patricia Highsmith, Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton, William Burroughs, JG Ballard, Delia Derbyshire and Patti Smith.

15 credits. Patterns of Perception: Part 1 Patterns of Perception: Part 1 15 credits 15 credits. Ornamentation Ornamentation 15 credits

Dr Jorella Andrews

This 10-week module explores examples of modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in which ornamentation is foregrounded. Our visual resources embrace 19th and early 20th practices—such as the Arts and Crafts Movement, Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Art Deco and Surrealism—as well as contemporary visual and digital works like Natalie Bookchin's single-channel video installation Mass Ornament of 2009 and Isaac Julien's critical/decorative film installations. We investigate the cultural and political contexts surrounding the emergence of these ornamentally inclined works, and examine how their impact and worth have been analysed and interpreted. Within the context of these studies we will consider models and logics of ornamentation drawn from African, Islamic and Oriental as well as Western cultures, make use of Goldsmiths’ rare books and textile collections, and experiment with a range of visually orientated research techniques including IPA (Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis).

15 credits. Fashion as a Dialectical Image Fashion as a Dialectical Image 15 credits

Dr Jenny Doussan

In his unfinished work, The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin formulates the dialectical image in terms of fashion, stating “The eternal is in any case far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea”. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin again calls upon fashion in his proposition of the messianic power of history to burst into the present from the dark thickets of time, likening its power to recall the past in a sudden illumination to revolution. He qualifies his assertion, however, by remarking that this tiger’s leap “takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands”. Taking Benjamin’s thought on fashion as its impetus, this module will explore the role that fashion has played as an instrument of Western cultural hegemony, as well as the subversive power that it simultaneously bears with its uncanny ability to hybridise culture and disrupt the norms of gender, class, geographical space and chronological time. Following Benjamin’s example, the module will draw from iconic garments, sociological texts, the critical reception of fashionable styles, and the representation of fashion and fashionable styles in visual media and literature, to develop a philosophy of fashion grounded in it its materiality. Issues of gender, agency and the body will be addressed, as will spectacle, historicism, the political, and the relation between human and animal and human and machine, all of which are among fashion’s preoccupations.

15 credits. Fact of Blackness I: Subjects of Difference Fact of Blackness I: Subjects of Difference 15 credits

Dr Nadja Millner-Larsen

This module takes its title from a mistranslation of Frantz Fanon’s fifth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks. More adequately translated as “The Lived Experience of the Black,” the text explores the production of black identity as an explicitly visual process – a result of seeing oneself be seen. Centralising Fanon’s insights for theorising the production of difference in the visual field, this course analyses the ways in which anti-colonial and anti-racist thought has been central to the theorisation of subjectivity within colonial modernity. How have philosophers and theorists of difference tested the very terms of visibility so often reinforced by discourses of racism and subjugation? We will look to classic texts that inaugurated the study of visuality and race as well as the contributions of feminist theory, queer theory, visual studies and performance studies in the rethinking of difference and the politics of representation.

This course is split into two complementary modules. Part I explores theories of subject-production and alterity both contemporaneous to Fanon’s moment of decolonisation and respondent to it. How have various models of subject-production (Marxist, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, existential, feminist) imagined the appearance of difference in the visual field? And how has the visual field itself been analysed?

15 credits. Beckett & Aesthetics: Bodies and Identity Beckett & Aesthetics: Bodies and Identity 15 credits 15 credits. Teaching style

This programme is taught through scheduled learning - a mixture of lectures and seminars. You’ll also be expected to undertake a significant amount of independent study. This includes carrying out required and additional reading, preparing topics for discussion, and producing essays or project work.

The following information gives an indication of the typical proportions of learning and teaching for each year of this programme*:

• Year 1 - 26% scheduled learning, 74% independent learning
• Year 2 - 15% scheduled learning, 65% independent learning, 20% placement
• Year 3 - 37% scheduled learning, 63% independent learning
How you’ll be assessed

You’ll be assessed mostly through coursework. Normally this consists of essays, sometimes accompanied by creative projects, group projects, multi-media projects, presentations, symposia, reviews, and studio work.

The following information gives an indication of how you can typically expect to be assessed on each year of this programme*:

• Year 1 - 92% coursework, 8% practical
• Year 2 - 95% coursework, 5% practical
• Year 3 - 80% coursework, 20% practical

*Please note that these are averages are based on enrolments for 2016/17. Each student’s time in teaching, learning and assessment activities will differ based on individual module choices.

Credits and levels of learning

An undergraduate honours degree is made up of 360 credits – 120 at Level 4, 120 at Level 5 and 120 at Level 6. If you are a full-time student, you will