The Fine Arts Department includes five BA majors and three MA course choices. It also offers a set of demanding theory courses and specialised interdisciplinary courses as well as an intense programme of conferences, symposia and readings, a series of off-site projects, commissions and partnerships, an exhibition space and a publishing programme of artists’ books.
Every day, this major art education programme in Switzerland is brought to life thanks to some 300 students, 50+ teachers – artists, theorists, curators – and numerous international guests.
© Raphaël LugassyREFORM OF THE BACHELOR'S PROGRAM IN FINE ARTS
The Department of Visual Arts is currently undertaking a reform of the Bachelor’s program that aims to strengthen its pedagogical coherence, to improve the clarity of the curriculum, and to enhance its alignment with current visual art practices and the realities of professional environments. This restructuring, organized around four new options, affirms the rootedness of multiple practices while preserving the intermediality that characterizes the different fields of contemporary art. It also relies on a repositioning of the options, conceived in relation to types of production as well as spaces and modes of dissemination.
The Bachelor’s programme of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD – Genève is structured around four options, offering a dynamic curriculum conceived as a laboratory for experimentation. Teaching is based on a wide range of formats that combine practice and theoretical reflection, providing students with the tools to position themselves in relation to the issues and realities of the contemporary art world. The programme brings together demanding theoretical and practical courses, as well as specialised transdisciplinary classes. These are enriched by contributions from internationally renowned guests — artists, theorists and curators — as well as by workshops, lectures, seminars, off-campus projects, institutional commissions and cultural partnerships. This openness encourages engagement with a variety of contexts and supports a pedagogy rooted in the current realities of the art field, while also questioning its developments and transformations.
Check out the program on the HEAD website
© Sylvain LeurentThe Work.Master programme – part of HEAD Genève’s Visual Arts Department – is a two-year MFA programme devoted to multi-disciplinary, studio-based, contemporary artistic practices.
As an incessantly evolving programme, Work.Master dares to take risks and proposes diverse formats which encourage experiment, exchange, and sharing, in order to challenge and develop the participants’ practice over the course of two years. As well as to reflect on the changing conditions of the arts with an increasing emphasis on diversity, post- and de-colonial discourses, climate change and rapidly changing technologies.
© HEAD – GenèveThe CCC - Critical Curatorial Cybermedia Master of the of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD Genève is a research program. It is based on the porosity and transversality between artistic and curatorial practices, and on the forms of public sharing, knowledge production, circulation, and dissemination that research through art generates. Drawing on artistic and curatorial investigative methodologies, the program invites students to engage in individual and collective research projects, aimed as much at the art scene as at the academic and scientific world, or even civil society. The program's dual artistic and curatorial address determines the need for transdisciplinarity in its pedagogy, with a strong emphasis on establishing a critical dialogue with the humanities and sciences through the prism of decolonial, intersectional feminist and queer theories.
© Greg ClémentTRANSform Master provides a practical and reflective framework for those who want to develop socially committed artistic practices based on forms of co-creation with people who do not define themselves as artists, and whose horizon is social transformation. Alternating between collective work and personal practice, the Master's program trains artists to develop politically situated, sustainable and ethical practices, drawing in particular on critical and feminist pedagogies.
Check out the program on the HEAD website