First year courses
FIN1006F Introduction to African Art
Course description
HEQF credits: 18 at level 5.
First-year, first-semester course, three lectures per week.Course code
FIN1006F
Course convenor(s)
Professor N Makhubu
Course outline
This course is an introduction to the theory of African Art across different historical periods. It is also an introduction to the complexities and contradictions of ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism(s)’ in postcolonial Africa. With a focus on ideology-driven interdisciplinary artistic movements and 20th Century art schools in Senegal, Nigeria, Sudan, Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia and South Africa, we will examine various schools of thought that were part of modern consciousness which characterised the independence decades. The course includes critical discussion of colonisation and the rise of PanAfricanism, Pan-Arabism and nationalism during the independence decades. The anti-colonial nationalist struggle in Africa is characterised by the formal appropriation of languages and visual aesthetics, globally. We debate the complexity of this appropriation and its significance in the nationalist struggle through a critique of unilinear progress from tradition to modernity (transfer of technology and political systems [civil society and African state]). Aimed at undermining colonial ideological foundations, African nationalism is characterized by literacy, cultural revival (traditionalist and neo-African), and a quest for African history. Through dialogue, debate and discussion this course provides a forum for critical thinking on art history and African art.
Entrance requirements
None
Lecture times
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday 5th period, Upper Campus
Dp requirements
At least 80% attendance of tutorials and satisfactory completion of 2 assignments per semester. Late essays penalised by 5% per day (including weekends).
Assessment
Semester coursework 60%, 2-hour examination 40%.
FIN1009S Approaches to Art History
Course description
HEQF credits: 15 at level 5.
First year, second semester courseCourse code
FIN1009S
Course Convenor
Dr Amie Soudien
Course outline
This course examines some of the foundational issues of academic art history. How and where did the study of art history begin, and what were its founding principles? We consider its origins in the late 19th century and then trace how it has changed in the course of the succeeding century and into the contemporary period. We look at debates over issues of aesthetic quality, questions of the relationship between art and society, questions of the art-historical canon and its exclusions. The core theme is art history as a subject of academic study, but this inevitably links to broader issues of how art is taught within the art school and of how art is exhibited within the museum.
Entrance requirements
None
Lecture times
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday – 5th period.
Dp requirements
At least 80% attendance of tutorials and satisfactory completion of 2 assignments per semester. Late essays penalised by 5% per day (including weekends).
Assessment
Coursework (50%), 2 hour examination (50%)
Second year courses
FIN2028S Discursive Strategies: Innovation and Adaption
Course description
HEQF credits: 24 at level 6.
Second-year, second-semester course.Course code
FIN2028S
Course convenor(s)
Dr T Monoa
Course outline
This course explores the urban environment in contemporary art practice and theory. We consider in particular the artist and artistic collectives focusing on the city, urban life, space, the body and technologies in Africa and across the globe. In part of the course students will engage the city in their own creative practice. Students will build skills in visual analysis, critical thinking and writing about art and visual imagery as well as approaches to visual and textual research. Fieldwork introduces site-specific practice.
Entrance requirements
FIN1006F and FIN1009S
Lecture times
Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 4th period
Dp requirements
At least 80% attendance of tutorials and satisfactory completion of 2 assignments per semester. Late essays penalised by 5% per day (including weekends).
Assessment
Semester coursework 50%, 2-hour examination 50%.
FIN2029F: Envisioning the body: Representation of the Human in Art and Visual Culture
Course description
HEQF credits: 24 at level 6.
Second-year, first-semester course.Course code
FIN2029F
Course convenor(s)
Dr Amie Soudien
Course outline
The intention of this course is to intervene in hegemonic notions of the body and to consider how the body has been accessed and constructed in art. Students will engage in close analysis of artworks in dialogue with a range of critical theoretical frameworks that explore how different bodies are represented and recognised.
Entrance requirements
FIN1006F and FIN1009S or at least 2 courses in historical, social science or cultural studies offered by the Faculty of Humanities, or by permission of the Head of Department.
Lecture times
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday in 2nd period
Dp requirements
At least 80% attendance of tutorials and satisfactory completion of 2 assignments per semester. Late essays penalised by 5% per day (including weekends).
Assessment
Coursework 60%, 2-hour examination in June 50%.
Third year courses
FIN3026F New Art: New Perspectives
Course description
HEQF credits: 30 at level 7.
Third-year, first-semester course.Course code
FIN3026F
Course convenor(s)
Dr T Monoa
Course outline
This course focuses on the way developments in technology have transformed contemporary artistic practice, theory and reception. Included here is coverage of African and global art practice, as well as artistic practice deeply involved with new forms of social networking, comic books and video games. Students will develop advanced skills in visual analysis, critical thinking and writing about art and visual imagery, visual and textual research approaches.
Entrance requirements
FIN2027H and FIN2028S
Lecture times
Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, 3rd period.
Dp requirements
At least 80% attendance of tutorials and satisfactory completion of 2 assignments per semester. Late essays penalised by 5% per day (including weekends).
Assessment
Semester coursework 50% and 2-hour examination 50%.
FIN3027S Critical Curatorial Praxes
Course description
HEQF credits: 30 at level 7.
Third-year, second-semester course, one lecture per week.Course code
FIN3027S
Course convenor(s)
Dr Portia Malatjie
Course outline
This course focuses on basic and nuanced understandings of the history and development of key concepts underpinning radical curatorial practices and theory, including, interdependent and collaborative curatorial engagements, undocumented co-curatorship, curatorial practices of care, decolonial methodologies in display strategies and imagined and speculative curatorial futures. The course will look at ways in which practitioners are dealing with current and urgent ideas around decoloniality, intersectionality and different forms of curatorial methods that might de-centre the exhibition as the goal and final outcome. This focus will enable students to situate their own creative practice – whether artistic, curatorial or theoretical – within the contemporary (and future) moment. Students will develop advanced skills in visual and auditory analysis, critical thinking as well as approaches to visual, textual, auditory, and other forms of research and knowledge production.
Entrance requirements
FIN2027F and FIN2028S
Lecture times
Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, 3rd period.
Dp requirements
At least 80% attendance of tutorials and supervisory meetings. Adequate submission of semester assignments.
Assessment
Semester coursework and presentation of seminar paper 50%; 2-hour examination 50%. Late essays penalised by 5% per day (including weekends.)
FIN3028F Race, Gender and Decolonial Praxis
Course description
HEQF credits: 30 at level 7.
Third-year, first-semester course.Course code
FIN3028F
Course convenor(s)
Dr Portia Malatjie
Course outline
This course considers decolonial artistic and curatorial praxes by focusing on blackness, neoliberalism, decoloniality, fat studies, disability studies, spirituality, sound studies, race and technology, and rest. It unpacks notions of normativity that are at the root of colonial and neoliberal frameworks, and considers ways in which these normative structures might be disrupted and undermined. Through a critical analysis of theory, politics and practice, the course is aimed at facilitating discussions about intersecting discourses of class, gender, race and sexuality. It centres debates, discussions, and critical thinking that move beyond pre-determined and limiting modes of engaging with artistic practice. Focusing on the Global South, students will learn different approaches to transdisciplinary and decolonial critical methodologies, with a keen focus on modes of resistance, refusal and fugitivity.
Entrance requirements
FIN1006F, FIN1009S, and two of the following: FIN2027F; FIN2028S; FIN2029F; FIN2030S.
Lecture times
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, 5th period.
Dp requirements
At least 80% attendance at tutorials and satisfactory completion of written assignments. Late essays penalised by 5% per day (including weekends).
Assessment
Semester coursework 60%; 2-hour examination 40%.
FIN3029S Borders and Social Justice in the Arts
Course description
HEQF credits: 30 at level 7.
Third-year, second-semester course.Course code
FIN3029S
Course convenor(s)
Dr Nomusa Makhubu
Course outline
This course examines selected case studies of art interventions advocating for social justice in relation to migration and mobility across political, cultural and social borders. We discuss spatial scales, globalisation, borderlands, internal conflicts, statelessness, exile, fugitivity, affective publics, marginality, citizenship and belonging. Through the inter-disciplinary field of visual culture and what has been characterised as the ‘spatial turn’ in the arts and cultural studies, the course takes critical approaches to the mutually dependent notions of space and place. Although there is emphasis on visual culture, this course is rooted in art history, architecture and/or the built environment. The notion that “place is involved with embodiment” positions bodies as central loci from which space is understood. Bodies inhabit and perform in space. The course focusses on relations between space, time and the body. Regulations of space are, in effect, regulations of the body. Here we consider the distinctions of public and private domains as well as modes of access and concepts of belonging or not belonging, being ‘native’ or ‘foreign’.
Entrance requirements
FIN1006F, FIN1009S, and two of the following: FIN2027F; FIN2028S; FIN2029F; FIN2030S.
Lecture times
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday 5th period.
DP requirements
50% of coursework completed and satisfactory submission of research paper. Late essays penalised by 5% per day (including weekends).
Assessment
Assignments 15%, Research paper 85%.
Postgraduate courses
FIN4055S Reading Course in Art Historical Studies
Course description
24 at NQF level 8
Course code
FIN4055S
Course convenor(s)
Dr Thabang Monoa
Course outline
This course offers a series of reading seminars offering critical analysis of foundational texts. The texts explore key issues and approaches that have formed the basis of debate in art history and visual culture over the past century. Discussion arising from these texts is designed to facilitate research for the long research essay (FIN4050W).
Entrance requirements
Acceptance for an Honours or Master’s programme.
Dp requirements
Attendance at all seminars and completion of all written work.
Assessment
Formal examination (40%).
FIN4054F Critical Issues in Contemporary Art
Course description
24 at NQF level 8
Course code
FIN4054F
Course convenor(s)
Professor Nomusa Makhubu
Course outline
This course brings together a variety of theoretical texts that may assist in understanding the diverse production and complex character of the contemporary art world. Central to this inquiry stands the notion of identity, a concept that seems to inform much of contemporary art. We will trace shifting conceptions of this notion over the last three decades, from the initial moments of identity politics, to the articulation of identity as performative, to current ventures into a post-identitarian world.
Entrance requirements
Acceptance for an Honours or Master’s programme.
Dp requirements
Attendance at all seminars and completion of all written work.
Assessment
Examined by coursework 100%
FIN4053S Studies in Historiography of Art
Course description
24 at NQF level 8
Course code
FIN4053S
Course convenor(s)
Dr Portia Malatjie
Course outline
Material artefacts are mute, but our understanding of them is communicated in words. With a focus on a topical issue or a genre of art, this course examines the relationship between artefacts and the texts that attempt to explain them. How do art-historical texts and related forms of writing offer insight into the works they discuss? Can they, contrary to intentions, sometimes form a barrier between viewer and work? And what is their role in gathering works into schools, movements and genres? This course examines aspects of the multi-faceted role of words as explicators of visual artefacts.
Entrance requirements
Acceptance for an Honours programme.
Dp requirements
Attendance at all seminars and completion of all written work.
Assessment
Examined by combination of coursework (60%) and formal examination (40%).
FIN4052F The Politics and Ethics of Collecting
Course description
24 at NQF level 8
Course code
FIN4052F
Course convenor(s)
Dr Amie Soudien
Course outline
This course considers the history of collecting by examining how acquisitions have been precipitated by economic, political, and epistemic sensibilities. Students are asked to critically examine the historical co-formation of art, archival and anthropological collections in a plethora of contexts to explore the inherited infrastructures and collecting conventions curators and other art practitioners work within today.
Entrance requirements
Acceptance for an Honours or Master’s programme.
Dp requirements
Attendance at all seminars and completion of all written work.
Assessment
Examined by combination of coursework (60%) and formal examination (40%)./p>
FIN4051S Art Criticism and Aesthetic Theory
Course description
24 at NQF Level 8
Course code
FIN4051S
Course convenor(s)
Dr Thabang Monoa
Course outline
This is an elective course, which offers advanced knowledge in aesthetic theory and art criticism and how the two intersect at the level of discourse. This course aims to introduce to student’s key concepts and methods prevalent in art criticism while interrogating artistic responses to social, historical, political, and cultural phenomena through aesthetic theory. The course equips students with critical thinking skills and generates awareness of debates pertaining to different approaches to contemporary art and different exhibition cultures. Fieldwork in the form of gallery, museum and other sites of art making is integral in this course; students will be expected to respond to exhibitions and texts through discursive engagements.
Entrance requirements
Acceptance for an Honours or Master’s programme.
Dp requirements
Attendance at all seminars and completion of all written work.
Assessment
Examined by coursework (100%).
FIN4050W Art Historical Studies Research Essay/Project
Course description
30 at NQF level 8
Course code
FIN4050W
Course convenor(s)
Dr Thabang Monoa
Course outline
An appropriate research paper of approximately 15,000 words in length, or project with catalogue, chosen in consultation with the convener of the Art Historical Studies Honours programme. Draft chapters of the research essay must be submitted by stipulated dates and the completed project must be submitted by no later than 30 October.
Entrance requirements
Acceptance for an Honours programme.
Dp requirements
Attendance at all seminars and completion of all written work.
Assessment
Art Historical Studies - 15000 word essay, Curatorship – 15000 word essay or project with 7500 catalogue essay.