Image: Caelan Renfree-Dyer, Untitled, 2017, Ceramic, Photographer: Andrew Barcham

Course Guide: OART1067

Lecturer: Dr Tammy Wong-Hulbert

Course Coordinator: Dr Tammy Wong-Hulbert (tammy.hulbert@rmit.edu.au)

Day: Tuesdays
Time: TBC

Delivery mode: Face-to-Face
Location: TBC

In this course, you will undertake a theoretical and historical examination of contemporary art curation across different contexts in Australia and overseas. Your theoretical investigation will be supported by project-based work to give you a critical and practical appreciation of the issues involved in conceptualising, developing and presenting exhibitions, including spatial thinking and planning. 

NOTE: If you are enrolled in, or have previously completed VART3413, you are not eligible to complete this course.

Image: Toshiro Shimada / Getty Images

Course Guide: VART3616

Lecturer: A/Prof Dominic Redfern

Course Coordinator: A/Prof Dominic Redfern (dominic.redfern@rmit.edu.au)

Day: Fridays
Time: 9.30-11:00

Delivery mode: Tutorials are face-to-face only, lectures are delivered online
Location: TBC

So, there’s you, and then there’s everything else. With use this in mind we divide this lecture series into exploring models of subjectivity – that’s you – throughout the modern period and their various assaults on our received notions of selfhood. Of course, not everyone gets to decide for themselves who they will be, and so we explore theoretical models that have attempted to address the subject position of those who have been assigned to play ‘other’ to the privileged white male. We look at feminist art and ideas, and their heritage in post humanism as well as theories of the ‘other’ as developed through post-colonialism here and elsewhere. To address everything external to the self – that’s the everything else – we also take in a variety of models of realism over the last 170 years of art history and theory as they attempt to address the world external to our thoughts and representations and how we might approach it.

This lecture series was previously offered in Sem 1, Year 2021 and 2022 and 2023. If you studied Critical Frameworks in that semester, we don’t recommend you enrol in this course.

Do not enrol in Critical Frameworks A and B at the same time, as they cover the same lecture content in the same semester.

_{Image: Pelle Cass, 2018, ‘Water Polo Match, Harvard’, from the series Crowded Fields. Composite photograph}

Course Guide: VART3638

Lecturer: TBC

Course Coordinator: Dr Pia Johnson (pia.johnson@rmit.edu.au)

Day: Wednesday
Time: 9.30 – 12.30

Delivery mode: Face-to-Face
Location: 6.5.1

Grounded in digital photography, this elective course introduces you to both foundational and advanced concepts and strategies in digital imaging. The classes foreground understanding over recipes – we want you to understand how computers handle images in order to equip you with the skills to be digitally literate creators.

Image: Fieldwork, Fiona Hillary

Course Guide: VART3709

Lecturer: Dr Fiona Hillary

Course Coordinator: Dr Fiona Hillary (fiona.hillary@rmit.edu.au)

Day: Wednesday
Time: 1.30 – 4.30

Delivery mode: Face-to-Face
Location: 39.4

Fieldwork is a process driven elective course that encourages you as an artist/curator to explore your creative practice in response to a site. You will experience and develop methodologies that interrogate site specificity. For example, you will learn to understand the whole process of knowing a site from the journey to the site, the time spent on site, its socio-historical, cultural, environmental and political context and the ensuing impact that those experiences and knowledges can have on your creative practice. You will then learn to adapt and apply those methodologies that are appropriate for your creative development and practice.

Image: i-Land X-isle (2012), Latai Taumoepeau. Photo by Zan Wimberley, 2013.

Course Guide: VART3711 & VART3713

Lecturer: Dr Torika Bolatagici

Course Coordinator: Dr Pia Johnson (pia.johnson@rmit.edu.au)

Day: Wednesday
Time: 9.30am – 12.30pm

Delivery mode: Face-to-Face
Location: 2.2.2

The theme for this course is Activism, Citizenship, Politics and Power. As a way to unfold this broad and complex theme in contemporary art, this unit will take the approach of identifying and thinking through various ‘sites of resistance’. Starting from ‘site’ as a way of marking the multiple locations, positionalities and subjectivities from which artists agitate, activate and seek modes of resistance to oppressive forms of power and dominance as experienced at the intersections of personal identity, community and global citizenship.

Themes in Contemporary Creative Practice A and B are just two different names for the same underlying theme offered. If you want to enrol in the course, but it is showing fully enrolled in your Enrolment Online, please contact art.postgradadmin@rmit.edu.au to enquire if a space might be available.

Course Guide: VART3739

Lecturer: Nikki Lam

Course Coordinator: Dr Fiona Hillary (fiona.hillary@rmit.edu.au)

Day: Wednesday
Time: 9.30-12.30pm

Delivery mode: Face-to-Face
Location: 50.1.001

In this course you will work closely with the context of the Artist Run Initiative (ARI).

You will expand your understanding of histories, contexts, critiques and possibilities mapped out by the network of ARIs in Melbourne and beyond.

Blindside has partnered with RMIT to deliver this course as a Blindside Pathways project. “Pathways program design and assessment structures offer participating students across all specialisations a cross-disciplinary experience of making art work, writing and curating at a professional level.” There is already an exhibition scheduled!

https://blindside.org.au/program/rmit-x-blindside-pathways

This course will be delivered by Nikki Lam, artist-curator, based in Narrm.  Born in Hong Kong, Nikki’s practice deals with the complexity of migration, diaspora and subjective/collective histories, often through poetry, translation, fragmentation, destruction and re-generation.

Based in the CBD, Blindside is an artist-run initiative at the forefront of contemporary art and is a leading platform for new and critical dialogues, multidisciplinary practice and bold ideas.

Image: Photographic lighting workshop

Course Guide: VART3741

Lecturer: N/A

Course Coordinator: Dr Pia Johnson (pia.johnson@rmit.edu.au) for Photography workshops; Dr Torika Bolatagici (torika.bolatagici) for Undergraduate Fine Art Workshops

Day: TBC
Time: TBC

Delivery mode: Face to face
Location: Course dependent

This course will enable masters’ students to undertake a specialised skills development workshop offered in the relevant undergraduate program. Students may undertake this course with the approval of their program manager after consultation and academic advice. The course may be undertaken if both the student and program manager identify a skills gap that is relevant to the student’s studio project that can be addressed by undertaking a workshop offered in an undergraduate program as a vertically integrated studio course.

Image: Caelan Renfree-Dyer, Untitled, 2017, Ceramic, Photographer: Andrew Barcham

Course Guide: OART1066

Lecturer: April Albert

Course Coordinator: Professor David Forrest (david.forrest@rmit.edu.au)

Day: Monday
Time: 5.30pm – 8.30pm

Delivery mode: TBC
Location: TBC

The course will examine key aspects of national and international arts management with particular reference to arts organisations in a cross-cultural context. This will entail a consideration of current practices in Australia and overseas with respect to economic, political and socio-cultural factors. You will be introduced to issues relating to: resource and fiscal management; fund raising; policy development and implementation; entrepreneurship; and marketing and communication. 

NOTE: If you are enrolled in, or have previously completed PERF1025, you are not eligible to complete this course.

Image: Toshiro Shimada / Getty Images

Course Guide: VART3616

Lecturer: Associate Professor Dominic Redfern

Course Coordinator: Associate Professor Dominic Redfern (dominic.redfern@rmit.edu.au)

Day: Fridays
Time: 9.30-11am

Delivery mode: Tutorials are face-to-face only, lectures are delivered online
Location: TBC

What does it mean to mean? How does meaning arise in material culture, and how has this question been approached in the western tradition? Over the course we consider this problem from a variety of vantage points: material culture as language; material culture as feeling; material culture as an extension of the body; material culture as form. This frame allows us to take in a number of elements of history that have affected our understanding of what art does: the linguistic turn that was so influential on twentieth century-culture and thinking; the history of modernism seen through a variety of lenses; the relationship of culture to philosophy since the renaissance; and the relationship of culture to embodiment before and after feminism. We weave the threads together with themes emerging and re-emerging across the weeks to build a series of interrelated narratives and contrasting positions that problematise and deepen our relationship to our making.

NOTES: Do not enrol in Critical Frameworks A and B at the same time, as they cover the same lecture content in the same semester.

This lecture series was previously offered in Sem 2, 2021 and 2022 and 2023. If you studied Critical Frameworks in that semester, we don’t recommend you enrol in this course.

Image: rawpixel.com via Pexels, used under creative commons.

Course Guide: VART3707

Lecturer: Dr Pauline Anastasiou

Course Coordinator: Dr Pia Johnson (pia.johnson@rmit.edu.au)

Day: Tuesday
Time: 9.30am – 12.30pm

Delivery mode: Face to face
Location: TBC

This course explores ways to engage with expanded notions of industry for creative practitioners. You will interact with a variety of voices and positions from within the art, photography and wider arts industries to contribute to your evolving relationship to professional practice.

Image: Fiona Hilary, ‘Companions in the Wrack’, 2019

Course Guide: VART3711 & VART3713

Lecturer: Dr Fiona Hillary

Course Coordinator: Dr Fiona Hillary (fiona.hillary@rmit.edu.au)

Day: Wednesdays
Time: 1.30pm – 4:30pm

Delivery mode: Face to face
Location: TBA

This course will invite you to think with and through the zeitgeist of posthuman, new materialist and feminist thinkers and creative practitioners in the climate crisis. This is an invitation to situate your practice and explore how contemporary artists are responding to new ways of thinking. Join Dr Fiona Hillary and her contemporaries in this creative exploration of ‘staying with the trouble’.

Image: Photographic lighting workshop

Course Guide: VART3741

Lecturer: N/A

Course Coordinator: Dr Pia Johnson (pia.johnson@rmit.edu.au) for Photography workshops; Dr Torika Bolatagici (torika.bolatagici) for Undergraduate Fine Art Workshops

Day: TBC
Time: TBC

Delivery mode: Face to face
Location: Course dependent

This course will enable masters’ students to undertake a specialised skills development workshop offered in the relevant undergraduate program. Students may undertake this course with the approval of their program manager after consultation and academic advice. The course may be undertaken if both the student and program manager identify a skills gap that is relevant to the student’s studio project that can be addressed by undertaking a workshop offered in an undergraduate program as a vertically integrated studio course.