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.

Area Manager: Ming Wong

The 2D subject-area includes painting and print-making. It is a wide area bordering on most visual arts. Here, questions are posed about representation, context, design, and interpretation. Critical focus is central, but the students also develop material- and technical knowledge.

Print-Making

The print-making subject-area covers several different techniques, where the Royal Institute of Art has long had a prominent educational role.

Today, we do not have access to the same premises as before, as the result of a fire which destroyed the workshops in 2016. That is why we have developed new, external collaborations with other educational institutions, so that we may continue to offer instruction in most print-making techniques. Today, there is a vibrant and well-adapted screen-printing workshop up and running.

Painting

Painting is not only about making art—since art also creates a context for discussion, and a place for experimentation. Because painting is an ongoing process, a work can both be considered as it is and as it contributes to shifting boundaries.

We instruct in art history, art criticism, and art theory. Students formulate questions about representation, context and the content of ideas that are an important part of both the artist’s design-work and in how others interpret the finished product. Teaching theory aims to increase awareness and reflection of one’s own work, and on the importance of art in society. We also train students to use various materials, methods and techniques—such as colour, light, texture and thickness—which allow our students to develop their artistic abilities.

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: Kristina Jansson

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).

Area Manager: Johanna Gustafsson Fürst

The Text Area was founded in 2021 and brings together courses and instructors responsible for Art Theory, Art History, and the MA Essay at the Royal Art Institute. We aim to create spaces where students learn to identify the ways art has made and continues to make history, to engage in the theoretical debates that are shaping the field now, to acquire research skills appropriate to further their artistic practice, and 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 materials workshops function in other media.

History and Theory of Art

In Year 1 and Year 2, students take introductory courses designed to give a historical and theoretical background to how the art field has developed after the 1960s.

MA Essay

Working closely with the MA Essay supervisor over two semesters, students analyze and reflect upon their artistic work in writing. It is currently examined in conjunction with students’ solo exhibition in Year 5.

MA Seminar In Art Theory

The MA Seminar is offered in two sections in the Fall term of the year. Each section is organized around a theme, medium or intellectual issue in contemporary art discourse. Past sections include photographic and media theory from Walter Benjamin to Melody Jue, debates in contemporary painting including issues of the representation of race in painting, and the notion of toxicity, which encompasses the abject, the informe, and current debates about climate collapse.

Writing Workshops

Short intensive courses are offered on specific conventions of writing in the arts and are designed to offer a modular, open-ended approach to the development of writing skills. This part of teaching in the Text Area also touches on alternative publishing platforms, experimental graphic design, and editorial practices in the arts.

Team

BA History and Theory: Axel Andersson
BA Writing: Fredrik Ehlin
MA Art Theory: Natasha Marie Llorens
MA Writing: Emma Kihl

Area Head: Natasha Marie Llorens