MRes MRes Art: Moving Image

We select applicants according to potential and current ability in the following areas:

• Evidence of skills and experience appropriate to the proposed field of enquiry
• Effective communication of the intentions and issues in the proposal
• The level of contextual awareness
• Awareness of the range and nature of challenges implied.

You may be invited to an interview following our review of your application. The interview is used to evaluate the extent to which a candidate demonstrates:

• The capacity for independent research
• Appropriate background knowledge and critical abilities
• Awareness of the cultural and social context within which their interests/work is situated
• Appropriate communication skills
• A preparedness to participate collaboratively in debate and presentation.

What we are looking for

We are seeking imaginative, resourceful individuals who are committed to exploring art discourses.

Our Postgraduate Art Programme offers valuable opportunities to build transferable professional knowledge and skills. The exchange of perspectives with others through shared units, reading groups and debates helps establish stimulating and productive networks.

The focus on proposing and developing a major independent programme of study is supported by a shared professional practice lecture series featuring guest speakers plus opportunities to attend symposia and critique work in progress across subject areas. The Postgraduate Art Programme has wide-ranging links with professional organisations, collections and galleries, and includes opportunities for interaction and networking according to your personal career direction.

MRes Art: Moving Image is unique in its relationship with LUX, the national public arts agency that explores ideas around artists' moving image and supports practice through a range of activities including distribution of works, exhibitions, education publishing and research. The pathway is supported by professional expertise from LUX and benefits from its extensive connections.

MRes Art: Moving Image anticipates both academic and professional outcomes for its students, enabling graduates to pursue a range of careers in artists' moving image culture. Some may opt for academic scholarship through doctoral research. Others may choose or continue in professions within curating and film programming, distribution, publishing and journalism. Possible career contexts include festivals, biennales, galleries, museums and archives. And for some graduates MRes Art: Moving Image will enable further enrichment of their own practice as artists working with moving image.

For details of the wide range of careers support provided for students, please visit the Student Jobs And Careers section.

Student jobs and careers

MRes Art: Moving Image offers an ambitious, discursive and critical framework in which you will engage with the implications of artists' moving image. The pathway has a strong professional focus. This is characterised by the unique link with LUX, the London-based agency for artists' moving image. This provides mentoring and support to student-directed symposia and screenings. 

The pathway proposes new approaches to the history and theory of moving image culture. While laying the foundations for an in-depth knowledge of the subject, it also promotes artists' moving image as an evolving field of study. Rather than following established historical trajectories, it presents an integrated series of screenings, seminars and readings of key texts. Gallery visits and lectures augment the seminar programme. 

MRes Art: Moving Image sets out to create a firm foundation of knowledge from which you can develop your chosen area of study and contribute to debate in the subject area. The first year offers teaching in research skills and engages you in the specialist subject of your pathway. Your understanding of research methodologies and their relationship with exploration of your subject is then developed. In parallel with this, you will prepare for a self-directed programme of study: your research project. In the second year you will pursue and realise your project. Your progress is supported through tutorials and critical discussions. It is monitored through written assignments and presentations. 

Unit 1: Framing Artists' Moving Image

Through seminars and lectures, this unit establishes knowledge of key thinkers and debates which have emerged throughout the development of artists’ moving image. It is split into four thematic parts: modern primitives, materialisms, the expanded field and the ethnographic turn.

Unit 2: Methodologies and Methods I

Unit 2 is an opportunity for all the students in the MRes Art course to study together. 

The unit has a core group of categories and approaches that have defined fundamental positions and concerns across the humanities, social sciences and arts. The unit maps out various schools of thought, methodologies and concepts that will help you to shape and define your research topics and aims.

Unit 3: Methodologies and Methods II

Following on from Unit 2, this unit deepens your understanding of specific artistic and discursive methods. You will examine how they operate in specific texts, debates and events by relating them to the pathways’ respective subject areas. Seminars and workshops are integral to the unit, in which methods of research and writing are collectively tested.

Unit 4: Individual Research Project