Postgraduate Open Studio, Workshop and Student-Led Conference Dates 2022

Adrian Fortuin, The Readymade, Made Ready, moulded plastic and granite, WYAA19 winner, 2019 Welcome to the Department of Fine Arts at the Wits School of the Arts! We hope that your postgraduate studies with us will be an exciting time of creative discovery, self-reflexivity and critical engagement in an interdisciplinary arts school. The Department of Fine Art offers the following postgraduate programmes: BA of Arts Honours in the field of Fine Arts (BA Hons Fine Arts) Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) Masters of Arts in Fine Arts (MAFA) Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Our postgraduate programmes are based on a practice-centred approach to research. Students will be exposed to exciting new models and thinking around practice-led research, research-led practice and artistic research. The Masters by Dissertation and PhD degrees consists of students producing a body of work and a dissertation and thesis respectively. The programmes are structured around a complementary approach between research and studio practice. The outcome of the degree is an original body of artistic work and a written component, which is set to meet the requirements of the University and standards of academic rigour as expected in any Masters and Doctoral programme. It is, however, important to position the written and traditional research component of the degree within the specificities of our diverse practices as artists and cultural producers. Honours students not only have structured courses that they need to attend, they will also produce a long essay around a focused research question, which could be done to engage their body of creative work as well.

As the Department of Fine Art, we aim to position ourselves as a University that speaks from the Global or Near South, orienting ourselves both from and towards our context, as South African and African. We understand the South as a complex arrangement of ideas and positions that derive from different locations, histories, flows and trajectories that form our contemporary. From here we position ourselves as a critical programme that speaks to this complexity.