Areas of Study

Moving Images, Photography, Sound and Performance

Mindepartementet is the Royal Institute of Art’s platform for moving images, photography, sound and performance. Here, our workshop-related training interacts with design- and theory-based approaches. The combined knowledge from different artistic processes gives our students, teachers, artists and researchers the opportunity to move across a wide artistic field.

Mindepartementet’s 500 square metres provides access to, a digital darkroom, a photo studio, and video-editing, as well as places for meeting, such as project- and seminar-rooms. The shared kitchen also plays an important social function for the exchange of informal knowledge and new thoughts.

Common Work

Here, students can use both digital and analogue tools. Professors, lecturers and adjuncts work together from the starting point of their respective fields. Artistic expressions are discussed and subjected to experimentation through critiques, joint-investigations, seminars, workshops, film screenings and exhibitions.

The 2D subject-area includes painting, drawing and printmaking. It is a broad area that touches on most visual art forms. Here, questions are posed about representation, context, design and interpretation. Critical discussion runs in parallel with opportunities for students to develop and deepen their knowledge of materials, techniques, and methods. In this area, we work actively to support and develop both individual and collective learning processes.

Printmaking

Over the past few years, the field of printmaking has undergone significant transformation. The relationship and endless mixes between artistic and commercial printmaking, involving the relations and intersections between printmaking as a craft and printmaking as other means of expression. Some artists address printmaking from the perspective of painting and drawing, and others as a medium used experimentally and/or conceptually.

The vision of printmaking at the Royal Institute of Art is that it can be both a working process, a unique expression, and a tool in many other image processes.

Silk screen is a relatively fast process where you can print on many types of materials, such as paper, textile, glass, and wood. Intaglio involves both very new and very old processes, such as etching, drypoint, mezzotint and photopolymer. Releif printing include wood cut and linoleum prints as well as the use of letterpress printing, which we also have planned to take place in the new spaces.

At the moment we are planning for new workshop spaces at Royal Institute of Art. The new spaces will include equipment for silk screen printing, Intaglio, releif printing, and also paper making and photo processes and digital drawing processes.

Painting

Painting is not only about making art – since art also creates context for discussion and a place for experimentation. Thanks to painting’s ever-dynamic relationship with its time, a work can both be considered as it is and contribute to shifting boundaries.

An experimental, interdisciplinary approach to learning is at the heart of painting education. We teach different materials, methods and techniques, allowing our students to develop their artistic skills. A wide range of courses, lectures and study visits allow students to test their ideas against different conceptual and material methods and approaches. Art theory, art history and art criticism are present at different levels and aim to increase awareness and ability to reflect on their own work and the importance of art in society. 

Drawing

Drawing can be seen and used as a simple tool for doing and acting as well as drive the very process of a work forward. It is an integral part of a variety of artistic expressions and serves to communicate, to understand and interpret the world and to create meaning.

At the institution, we aim to work with drawing and the material of drawing in an expanded sense, both in terms of technique, methodology and material. The focus on drawing is given in various courses and educational moments but also forms the basis for large parts of the teaching in the 2D area.

The Material Institute

Materialinstitutet (‘The Material Institute’) conducts teaching and practical work in materials and methods of painting.

Here, students can prepare their canvases, produce their own artistic materials such as oil paints, watercolour paints, inks, wax-based crayons and paint-media. They can also make their own pigments with natural materials. The Material Institute has a small colour-plant nursery, which mainly consists of woad (Isatis tinctoria), which produces the blue colour indigo—but experiments are also underway with plants of other colours.

The Material Institute has a unique collection of older pigments and binders. The oldest samples are from the 1850s-90s, and come from the artist Nils Månsson Mandelgren’s paint box. Subsequently, the collection has been expanded with additional pigments, binders and chemicals. Overall, it holds about 1,500 samples. The collection is a historical artifact, and part of the history both of the subject-area and the Royal Institute of Art.

Area Manager: Lina Bjerneld

Sculpture and Three-Dimensional Design

The 3D subject-area includes teaching in all forms of three-dimensional design, providing a number of opportunities to experiment with different materials and techniques linked to the sculptural process. Students have access to workshops in digital 3D, mechatronics, wood, metal, sculpture, glass and bronze, among others.

Both Analogue and Digital

In the various workshops, the students work with different materials and ideas. Results include both sculptural- and installation-work, as well as productions of various types, such as video- or photo-projects.

Our 3D lab offers the opportunity to work with modelling, scanning and printing. There is also equipment available for work using artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR).

The Text Area was founded in 2021 and brings together courses and faculty responsible for art theory, art history, artistic research methodologies and essay writing at the Royal Institute of Art. We aim to create spaces where students learn to identify the ways art has made history and continues to do so; where they engage in the theoretical debates that are shaping the field now; where they develop research methodologies appropriate to their artistic practice; and where they formulate rigorous, experimental analyses of their own work and the work of their peers in writing.

The Text Area operates outside the Professor Group structure at the Royal Art Institute. Students take our core courses according to their year of study. They enroll in writing workshops as elective courses, like the way material workshops function in other media.

Art History for Artists

Students take an introductory course in year one designed to give a historical and theoretical background to the field of art field. It is organized thematically rather than chronologically.

Introduction to Writing

Also offered in the first year of studies, this short module aims to give students familiarity with the different writing forms that will touch their artistic practices during the studies and beyond them.

Experimental Writing

The second module in an arch that runs throughout the five-year program, this course in the second year builds on the introduction to widen students’ understanding of writing practices in the fine arts to its experimental edges.

Thematic Art and History Course

Students develop their general knowledge of art history in a second year course that is taught by theme, which changes year to year. Past courses include: “Gifts, Sacrifices and Excess”, ”Art and the Apocalypse, and ”Monsters/Garbage/Art”.

BA Essay

In the third year, students write a short essay to conclude their BA degrees in Fine Art in which they reflect on the essay form as it relates to their own processes.

Research Methods

Year four opens with a course that introduces students to the notion of artistic research; its ambition is to complement students’ work on the MA Essay and post-graduate engagement with the field.

MA Essay

Working closely with the MA Essay supervisor over two semesters, students analyze and reflect upon their artistic practice in writing.

MA Seminar In Art Theory

The MA Seminar is offered in two sections in the Spring term of the year. Each section is organized around a theme, medium or intellectual issue in contemporary art discourse. It is aimed to equip students with a working knowledge of theories relevant to the arts and deepen their critical reading skills in English.

Workshops and Electives

Short intensive courses are offered on specific topics related to writing and theory. In the Fall term of 2024, Emma Kihl with Åsa Andersson offered “Speculative Storytelling and Fabulating Sketches: A Book Circle for Reclaiming Imagination during Gaias’ Intrusion”; in the Spring term of 2025, Valentina Desideri will offer an elective course on “lecture-performance” as a format to convey and expose artistic research and Axel Andersson will offer the returning elective “KKH Expeditionary Force” where each year students walk several days between art institutions creating a joint ambulatory university.

Team

BA History and Theory: Axel Andersson
BA Writing: Emma Kihl and Michele Masucci
Research Methods: Valentina Desideri
MA Art Theory: Natasha Marie Llorens
MA Essay: Michele Masucci