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Elective courses

Our elective courses are specially designed to our students in order to broaden and deepen their artistic skills and critical abilities and provide tools to understand and master the artistic discourse in contemporary art. The elective courses are only available to our program students.

Elective courses spring semester 2024

The horror, the horror says Mr. Kurtz

MFA-level

How does Europe and USA deal with the legacy of colonialism- and other atrocities? With guilt could be one answer. For how many generations? Is the guilt collective or individual? And then what?

We’ll read some central texts on and from colonialism and postcolonialism. Is there a beyond post-colonialism? We’ll invite artists and scholars who are working with the guilt-ridden questions about guilt and justice – not only in Congo but in Germany, in Israel-Palestine, in Sápmi, in Greenland only to mention a few. As participant in the course, you will write a text as the conclusion of the course.

Confirmed guest speakers: Sven Augustijnen, Elvin Landaeus Csizmadia, Sanimir Resic, Mathias Danbolt, Julia Wilen

Credits: 15 
Teachers: Gertrud Sandqvist & Maj Hasager & 6 guests
Dates: 17/1, 24/1, 31/1, 7/2, 21/2, 28/2, 6/3, 13/3, 10/4 
Hours: 10.00-12.00 all days except 24/1 15-17, 28/2 10.00-15.00, Lecture room, Mazetti
Form: : Seminar
Language: English
Number of students: Unlimited

Analyzing your own artistic work

MFA-level

The aim is to provide the students with deepened knowledge and insight in both the artistic field which their work will be a part of and the history of how that field has developed. To integrate analytical knowledge into their own artistic work, both in the spoken and the written language, will be given special attention. 

The course aim is to enhance the students’ ability to formulate and show a well-motivated artistic wholeness. The goal is that the students shall develop a deepened understanding of artistic work.

The course offers a model for analysing your own work and training in analysing images. Students analyse works by other students, and to listen when their own work is analysed by the others. The course serves as an introduction to the analytical component of the MFA exam.

The course offers close analysis of the students’ own work in group seminars. The method is simple. It aims at giving students tools for thorough analysis of individual works and an understanding of how viewers understand their work. If it is relevant and if the participants wish, we will also read image theory that might be applicable to the students’ work.

Credits: 7,5
Teacher Gertrud Sandqvist
Dates: 30 January– 5 March 2024
Hours: Tisdagar 10.00 -12.00. Project room 1, Båghallarna
Form: Seminar
Language: English
Number of students: 6

Welding

BFA-level

Through this course you gain knowledge about different welding techniques such as mig- and gas-welding as well as information about the security regulations for the different techniques. After the course you will receive a “driver’s license” that allows you to work on your own with the welding equipment. 

Credits: No credits
Teacher: Ariel Alaniz 
Dates: 15 - 26 January, Båghallarma
Hours 10.00 – 16.00
Form: Workshop
Language: Swedish and english
Number of students: 6

A two-day course in analogue photography

BFA-level

Going through cameras, studio-equipment, film-developing and printing. Introduction and advanced, the content is individually adapted as needed.

Teacher: Maria Hedlund
Dates: To be set individually
Hours: Based on needs
Form: Workshop
Language: Swedish and English

Form a form that forms a form: Experimental casting course

BFA-level 

”Haphazardly. Tentatively. Seek a form. Form a form that forms a form.” 
From It by Inger Christensen 

The craft of mouldmaking and casting can be traced far back in time and has been used in many ways; from shaping ceramic vessels to the production of industrial components, from the meticulous systematization of animals/plants to the mapping of archaeological sites, from the manufacturing of church bells to the endless reproduction of everyday objects. Casting has also had an important function in art history as a tool for creating, reproducing and transferring information from one material to another. I see mouldmaking as a kind of meditation that gives the opportunity to approach something from a new perspective, via a material process. By giving something time and attention, a relationship arises where material and object begin to dictate their own will. The process of working with a material thus generates new ways of thinking and seeing; material and object, form and content seem to be concepts closely connected to each other.

In this experimental casting course, we explore new materials and experiment with the limits of how specific materials can and cannot be used. We use traditional casting techniques but try to expand their use to find new ways forward. 

The purpose of the course is to individually explore one or some specifically selected materials and, via practical and theoretical research, get an understanding of the inner logic of the material/s and how this can be used as a conceptual framework. In addition to basic materials such as clay, gypsum, silicone and wax, the course provides, among other things, jesmonite, pigment, paraffin, latex, porcelain casting slip, molding sand.

Credits: 6
Teacher: Gabriel Karlsson
Dates: 19 February -1 March, Båghallarna
Hours:  10.00 – 16.00
Form: Workshop 
Language: Swedish and English
Number of students:  8-10

What is Material?

BFA-level

This five-day block seminar asks questions about the properties and boundaries of things, examines environmental contingencies, and considers the role of perception in constructing meaning, all as ways to identify what the “material” of an artistic practice may be.

We will begin by examining attention and perception as changing entities, affected by time, place, social context and technology. We will consider the role of ‘everyday matter’ in artworks which use existing objects to reorient subjective experience towards a broader public sphere. We will focus primarily on artists and exhibition-making from the last 30 years in which found-objects, debris, or diaristic practices are engaged as artistic material. These will include Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Isa Genzken, Laurie Parsons, Jason Dodge, Moyra Davey, James Richards, Klara Lidén, Mark Leckey and others. Together we will read short texts by writers and philosophers including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Perec, Valentina Desideri, Eileen Myles, and Jane Bennett.

Through our analysis we will develop vocabularies, fine-tune attention and identify our own material interests, thereby linking the practicalities of studio work with broader histories of art and theories of ideas.

Reading List

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Theory of the Body is Already a Theory of Perception” in Phenomenology of Perception, 1962

• Georges Perec, “Notes Concerning the Objects that are on my Work-table” in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1976

• Valentina Desideri, “Notes on Reading” in Jason Dodge, Ready to get bleeding, 2016

• Eileen Myles, For Now, 2020

• Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things, 2010

Credits: 3
Teacher: Kirsty Bell
Dates: 11-15 March
Hours10.00 -16.00
Form: Seminar
Language: English
Number of students: 25

Sketching for a public art project

BFA-level 

In this course you will learn about the process of a public art commission and how to make a sketch for a public artwork. The course will be structured like a sketching process for a public commission. You will develop your own sketch for a public artwork.

The context of this project could be either something you come up with, a place that you think would be interesting to make a public artwork for, or you can choose to get a context decided for you.

At the beginning of the course, we will go through the process of how a public commission work. We will look at the economics and legal terms that must be met when you make a public artwork. You will meet different commissioners and consultants for public art that will present their work. We will also read a little bit about the history of public art and look at some examples.

Before we start up the sketching process, we will go to the Museum of Sketches and look at their collection of sketches for public art to get some examples of different ways to present a project. After this you will all start up your project. To do the sketches all participants will be given a sketching budget of 5000 SEK that will be provided through a collaboration with Konstnärscentrum Syd. This means that you will have to make an invoice either through your own company or some external service. You will be given some advice and help with this. Through the sketching process I will be the fictional art consultant of your project. We will have a startup meeting, a halfway meeting, and a meeting before the final presentation of your sketch. The final presentation of your sketches will be held as a short exhibition at Museum of Sketches that we will be installing together. In conjunction with the opening of this exhibition you will also give a short presentation about your sketch.

Credits: 12
Teacher: Joakim Sandqvist
Dates 16 February – 15 April 

The course starts 16 February the Museum of Sketches, Lund (10-15)
19 – 23 February, Lecture room, Mazetti
9 -11 April, (note: 11 April opening at the Museum of Sketches with presentation evening-time) 
Deinstallation 15 April at the Museum of Sketches, Lund
Outside the lecture hours the course encompass individual work with your project and individual tutorials.Hours:  10-17
Form: Workshop 
Language Swedish and English 
Number of students: 8-10

Documenting Your Artworks, Practical photography course

BFA/MFA-level

The aim of the course is to introduce photographical- and digital technique, and to give the appropriate knowledge to the participants for being able to make documentations of their own work.

Photo-studio

We will go through “general” camera settings, how to use a gray card, light settings on
flat and three-dimensional objects, discuss common obstacles and how to overcome
them. As a preparation for photographing installation views, we will discuss natural light
vs portable studio light and look at examples from both. We will also document work in
motion and reflective works.

Computer-room

We will look into how to get a good digital workflow: Calibrating screen. Photoshop
editing and RAW-file processing. Correcting exposure, white balance and lens distortion.
Merging images with different exposures and removing unwanted objects like dirt from
the floor and walls, emergency signs etc. Straightening lines. Creating a seamless
sequence of images.

Camera and light settings

”General” camera settings, how to use a gray card, common obstacles and how to
overcome them.

Photographing installation views and individual works

Natural light vs portable studio light - examples from both and how to document works in motion and reflective works, with examples.

Digital workflow

Calibrating screen, Photoshop editing and RAW-file processing. Correcting exposure, white balance and lens distortion. Merging images with different exposures, removing unwanted objects (dirt from floor and walls, emergency exit signs etc), straightening lines and creating a seamless sequence of images.

Credits: 6
Teachers: Youngjae Lih & Johan Österholm
Dates: 13 -17 May & 27 May – 2 June
Hours:  10.00 –16.00
Form: Workshop
Language: English  
Number of students: Mandatory for BFA2 & MFA1

Horizontal Images

BFA-level 

This one-week intensive seminar looks at a series of works from the history of moving images through a non-linear and non-historicizing approach that oversteps the often rigid categories of industrial filmmaking, artists' films, expanded cinema, YouTube clips, and more. 

The ambition is to look at these works, to highlight the different methods and ways of dissemination artists and filmmakers can employ, which exist in the space between the conventions of art institutions black boxes, the rituals of cinema, and the increasingly private viewing habits of social media and multi-national streaming services taking place in the domestic sphere.

The first three days of the course will consist of lectures, screenings, and group discussions,with each day organized around a specific thematic framework, encompassing:

  • How different editing interfaces shape artistic languages (Sadie Benning, Kevin B. Lee, Mark Leckey, Peggy Awash)
  • The impact of the transition in the cinema industry from analog to digital on the language of filmmaking (Michael Mann, Nick Pinkerton/Tsai Ming Liang,Ethnographic Sensory Lab).
  • How personal narratives can be interwoven into non-narrative forms (Gunvor Nelson, Edward Owens, Moyra Davey, Mati Diop, Ed Atkins).
  • The subversion of conventions in documentary filmmaking, transcending the traditional distinction between fiction and fact (Anders Edström & C.W. Winter, TrinhT. Minh-ha, Mati Diop).
  • The examination of the roles of collectives and alternative structures in the production of moving image works (The Otolith Group, Black Audio Film Collective, Dziga Vertov Group)

In the final two days, the 'input' phase of the course will be paused to allow students to.prepare presentations for the last day. Proposed for Thursday, is to have two guest lectures from FilmForm (The Swedish art film & video archive) 

Filmform (Anna-Karin Larsson and/or Andreas Bertman) will travel from Stockholm to Malmö to present a history of FilmForm. This won't be a standard organizational introduction but rather an exploration of how artists have engaged with moving images since the organization's inception in the 1950s. They will discuss FilmForm's ongoing work with archives, artists, and how the organization adapts to the evolving media landscape. Their presentation will illuminate the practical aspects of workingwith artists, including presentation, exhibition, and compensation negotiations.

On the last day of the course, each participant will give a 20-minute presentation based on one of the works discussed, related to their past, current work, or proposed work. There will be a 20-minute discussion after each presentation. These presentations do not aim to provide an art-historical account but rather to relate one's own work to a broader discourse on moving images.

Credits: 3
Teacher: Amin Zouiten
Dates: 2-5 April & 8 April
Tid: 10.00 – 15.00
Form: Seminar
Language: Swedish and english

Language

Under the heading “Språk/Language”, English is default. When “Swedish and English” is indicated, depending on the language competencies of the student group, the course might be offered in Swedish or other Scandinavian language.


Elective courses fall semester 2023

A Material Opera – a Survey of methods into the Choreographed Exhibition

The course focusses on lectures, texts and essays that research material agency, performative materials, queer materialism, performance, exhibition activation / space activation, tactility, sensorial experiences, automata, organic and inorganic materials, material duration and time (time keeping/clocks). Collectively we'll formulate and investigate research questions in order to expand the ability to create performative art works and a choreographed exhibition. Like; What time frames are at stake within the context of an exhibition? What performative strategies can be applied within this space? What institutional and material limitations might be at stake and how can we collaborate with these limitations? We'll zoom in on new materialism, feminism, porous bodies and materials, material agency, ecology, contemporary notions of performance within the art institute at large.

Teacher: Isabelle Andriessen

Radical Cringe

Radical Cringe is a 3-week production course where we’ll wallow in the aesthetics of glorious embarrassment, shame and bad taste. Oversharing, overacting and over-being, we’ll watchneach other through our fingers as we search for a radical agency in being free from self- awareness. In an era where the pressures of self-presentation are almost paralyzing, and conversely, where cringe culture has become a veritable force in the entertainment industry, we’ll engage cringe as a joyous escape valve. If the feeling of cringe is a warning that one has violated some social norm and strayed from the cultural path, is it not also precisely a territory we should seek out as artists, a place where authenticity, vulnerability, otherness and innovation overlap. The working process will involve daily active sessions borrowing techniques from devised theatre, improvisation, performance art and contemporary dance, combined with discussion. Mixing solo and group production, we'll create a performance, which will be presented at the end of the course.

Teacher: Michael Portnoy

16 mm Film - the Fundamentals

This course is designed as an introduction to the fundamental skills involved in making 16mm film. The students will learn how to use a 16mm camera, how to measure and set lights, and also 16mm film editing: how to cut and splice the film and use a Steenbeck editing table.

In the first part of the course we will go through a series of hands on exercises with the camera in the studio or on location. The exercises will be structured as scenes, which will become a film made in collaboration. Additionally, each student will be g Lihiven 3 films and the opportunity to shoot a film of their own and receive feedback, technical and artistic advise on this.

When we meet again the students will be introduced to working on a Steenbeck editing table. This will be done through collective and individual exercises. We will edit the film material we made together and the participants will be able to edit their individual films as well. Also, as part of the course we will discuss media archeology and media theory –the history of images and film in relation to new digital media.

Teachers: Youngjae Lih & Sophie Ljungblom

Negative/Positive: Divergence and Repetition

In the field of photography there are concepts that are present both as methods and as technology. At the same time, these concepts have been used extensively as figures of thought or metaphors in, for example, philosophy and psychoanalysis. Two of these concepts are repetition and the negative/positive. In this course, we want to use these concepts both in relation to artistic practice; in relation to our "doings", as well as look at how they have been used historically as visual expressions, metaphors and methods in photography, art, psychoanalysis and philosophy.

Teachers: Katarina Elvén and Beata Fransson

Welding course

Technical instruction course in welding.

Teacher: Ariel Alaniz

Digital Print

During a one-week course, we will learn the basics of how digital images work and different principles for digital image processing and printing. We will learn to print with a large format printer through a RIP (Raster Image Processor).

There will be a focus on photography, but other mediums are also welcome. During the course we learn basic theory about how digital sensors and digital images work and what happens in the process when they are materialized on a paper or a canvas. By experimenting with different software, paper, and editing, we will try to understand the process and search for the best suiting expression for each project.

Teacher: Joakim Sandqvist

Original, copy, original: Casting course in bronze and aluminium

From original to original. From one material to another. Advance casting course that introduces some of the traditional techniques which is used to work with bronze and aluminum. The course provides a basic understanding of mold making (plaster and silicone), working with wax/lost wax-casting (cire perdue) and sand casting. The course is divided into two parts, the first will take place in the plaster workshop at Båghallarna, in two weeks we explore the basics of making molds in plaster and silicone to cast wax originals. In the second part we change location to work in the foundry at KKV (Bragegatan 15), and during a two-week period we transfer the wax copy to bronze and/or aluminum and learn the basics of sand-casting.

Teacher: Gabriel Karlsson

Abject

The word actually means despicable, absurd – and in the 18th century, abandoned. After Julia Kristeva published her ground-breaking essay Les Pouvoirs de l’horreur in 1980, abject and abjection have entered the art theory standard lexicon. Yet, reading Powers of Horror is a dizzying experience.

According to Kristeva, the omnipotent, shadowy and terrifying Mother is there somewhere, as is an idealised image of the father. The combination creates violent disgust, horror, hatred, but also a longing for purity, the ideal... We will read Powers of Horror in its entirety, and examine what the swing between abject/sublime produces within art, from Celine to Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman etc. We will also read the British anthropologist Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger, which inspired Kristeva, and the parallel case of Klaus Theweleit’s equally pioneering two-volume work MännerPhantasien (Male Fantasies) 1977. It will be a bewildering journey between abyss and plateau, to the edge of the self and beyond.

Teacher: Gertrud Sandqvist

Economics and Law for Artists

The aim of the course is to provide theoretical knowledge and practical skills in economy and law that are important for students in the artistic process and the practice of art as well as in the role as small business owners.

The purpose is to prepare students for questions about economy and law that they may encounter after their studies. Not least, students should get insight into when it may be necessary to consult legal and / or financial expertise.

Teacher: Katarina Renman Claesson