Master in Critical Studies

The Master in Critical Studies program is an artistic-scholarly program. It lasts five semesters with an artistic-academic project being developed in the final semester. The program is completed with a Master of Arts (MA) degree.

The program is intended for students who have a diploma or a B.A. in a subject related to the arts or humanities and/or for those who have achieved a corresponding qualification in an artistic discipline and who wish to pursue an artistic-scholarly education.

The program pursues three teaching objectives. It is intended to prepare students for academic doctoral studies, primarily in art theory and cultural studies but also in the disciplines of education in the arts and in architecture. It is intended to equip students to continue artistic research towards an arts-based research doctoral study, a PhD in practice or a comparable qualification. It is intended to prepare students for activities in public artistic and cultural fields of practice, especially for work in journalism, specialized and academic journalism as well as for curatorial, archival, mediational and other such activities.

The program has artistic, theoretical, propaedeutically preparatory, practical and such parts in which forms of practice are purposefully intermingled and their clear demarcation called into question.

The course consists of six modules. In each of these modules, students take courses during the first four semesters. In the first module, students individually join art classes at the Institute of Fine Arts and participate to a limited extent in regular art classes. In the second module, they develop artistic and scholarly approaches in project studies with two teachers each from different disciplines. In the third, they choose between seminars offered by the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies. In the fourth module students attend a practice-oriented seminar held by an external specialist. In the fifth module, methods and aspects of artistic-scholarly practices are discussed in the framework of the Kolloquium, partly on the basis of the students' own works and working methods. In the sixth module, elective courses can be taken. In the fifth semester, the Master's project is developed.

The Master in Critical Studies program is primarily oriented towards those critical positions that have been inspired by, among others, Gender Studies, Post- and Decolonial Studies, Subaltern Studies, Cultural Studies and Queer Studies, but also by the Frankfurt School, Poststructuralism and Deconstruction. In addition, theories of the visual, medialities, the public, and the social will be addressed - throughout in relation to artistic processes and methodologies.

Students will work in small teams and cross-institutional larger groups. They will be supervised from a pool of faculty from almost all institutes of the Academy, although they will be primarily involved in the Institute of Art and Cultural Studies.