First deadline to apply:
January 22. 2018
January 22. 2018
2nd deadline to apply:
April 30. 2018
April 30. 2018
What are we busy with?
This twelve-month Masters programme is a question-led study that supports performance-related artists and art professionals to experiment and develop as practitioners and researchers through rigorous mentoring, extensive workshops and encounters with leading artists, thinkers and curators from around the world – as well as intensive peer-to-peer exchange. Over three semesters, artists enter into an environment geared towards extending and deepening their practice – as well as their capacity for generating discourse around that practice.
The Master’s programme takes each enrolled artist’s practice as the starting point for the study, and as such it is expected that each studying artist enters the course with a performance-related project that they wish to develop and realise throughout the 12 months. This project should be specific to their interests, questions and concerns as an artist – and draw upon their pre-existing artistic practice.
The course organises around guest artists, curators, thinkers and arts organisations from around the world that approach performance, choreography, theatre and dance as expanded fields of practice – capable of producing experimental intersections between art and other fields of knowledge and practice, such as activism, social practices, fields of science and philosophy.
What do studying artists work on?
- A question-led study that strives towards strengthening your sense of the questions, goals and objectives that operate at the heart of your artistic practice.
- Seminars and workshops that strengthen your capacity for conceptual developments, dramaturgical thinking, research planning and mapping – as well as artistic decision making.
- Seminars, reading groups and workshops that strengthen your capacity for contextualising your artistic practice and research, as well as strengthen your attitude towards the kinds of conversations you want to be having in relation to your work. A heightened sense of how you want to facilitate those conversations – via which formats.
- An expanded toolbox of artistic methods and approaches – with space, time and support to exercise them in relation to your questions and concerns as an artist.
- A sustainable vision for how you want to continue with your artistic practice post-graduation.
- Experimental processes that support and instigate interaction and exchange between artistic practice and other fields of activity and knowledge.
- Special attention paid to the intersection between social and political activist strategies and art making; focus given to art that is not only critical of the realities it is entangled with, but capable of resisting or transforming them.
- Exposure to some of the world’s leading artists, thinkers and curators – and space and time to work and reflect with them. Artists from the performing arts, but also music, design and visual arts.
Who did we work with from between 2016 and 2018?
Over the last two cycles we have worked with Ant Hampton (UK/BE), Philippe Quesne (FR), Satu Herrala (FI), Erik Deluca (US), Christophe Meierhans (BE), Egill Sæbjörnsson (IS), Tania Bruguera (CUB), Brokentalkers (IRE), Werner Herzog (DE), contact Gonzo (JP), Agnes Quackels (BE), Gerald Kurdian (FR), Blast Theory (UK), Ólafur Ólafsson (IS), Libia Castro (ESP), Choy Ka Fai (SGP), Franko B (IT), Erna Ómarsdóttir (IS), Valdimar Johannsson (IS), Marisa Olson (US), Antonia Alampi (IT), Iliana Fokianaki (GRC), Holly Herndon (US), Boyle and Shaw (GB), Adam Gibbons (UK), Per Ananiassen (NO), Steinunn Ketilsdóttir (IS), Yana Ross (RU), Rosie Heinrich (UK/NL), Sodja Lotker (CZ), Dana Michel (US), Mette Edvardsen (NO), Matteo Fargion (IT/UK), Elina Pirinen (FI), Benedict Andrews (AUS), Ásgerður G. Gunnarsdóttir (IS), Steinunn Knútsdóttir (IS), Kviss Búmm Bang (IS), Eva Rún Snorradóttir (IS), Ragnheiður Gestsdóttir (IS), Ragnheiður Skúladóttir (IS), Alexander Roberts (UK/IS), Lauren Barri Holstein (UK), Berglind Tómasdóttir (IS), Aaron Wright (UK), Manolis Tsipos (GRC), Margrét Norðdahl (IS), Mammalian Diving Reflex (CA), Mark Storor (UK), among others.
Who will we work with in the 2017/18 cycle?
Built into the culture of the programme is a commitment to work with the artists who come to teach over the long term. This means the MFA becomes a hub for an international body of artists, thinkers and curators that return to Iceland repeatedly – year on year. As such, many of the artists, curators and thinkers that taught on the programme over the last two cycles will return.
For more info go to: www.