Fine Arts

The five options in the HEAD – Genève bachelor’s course in visual arts are run by teams of artists, theorists and curators from Switzerland and elsewhere. This innovative structure provides an approach that goes beyond the traditional divisions into media (painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video, performance and new media), themes (bodies, spaces, images, interfaces, realities and reproductions) or methods (books, programmes, studios, projects, collective or individual initiatives). Its unusual groupings are based on the hybrid reality of contemporary artistic practice. The theoretical instruction provides a multivocal approach that blends readings across time, practices and disciplines of thought. The specialised classes, focusing on production, offer a high-quality interdisciplinary technical approach and a series of 1:1-scale artistic experiments.

The Work.Master programme – part of HEAD Genève’s Visual Arts Department – is a two-year MFA programme devoted to multi-disciplinary, studio-based, contemporary artistic practices.

As an incessantly evolving programme, Work.Master dares to take risks and proposes diverse formats which encourage experiment, exchange, and sharing, in order to challenge and develop the participants’ practice over the course of two years. As well as to reflect on the changing conditions of the arts with an increasing emphasis on diversity, post- and de-colonial discourses, climate change and rapidly changing technologies.

The CCC - Critical Curatorial Cybermedia Master of the of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD Genève is a research program. It is based on the porosity and transversality between artistic and curatorial practices, and on the forms of public sharing, knowledge production, circulation, and dissemination that research through art generates. Drawing on artistic and curatorial investigative methodologies, the program invites students to engage in individual and collective research projects, aimed as much at the art scene as at the academic and scientific world, or even civil society. The program's dual artistic and curatorial address determines the need for transdisciplinarity in its pedagogy, with a strong emphasis on establishing a critical dialogue with the humanities and sciences through the prism of decolonial, intersectional feminist and queer theories. 

Each year, the CCC Public Seminar offers a cross-disciplinary platform to explore a particular theme in greater depth. In 2023/24, the Research (F)acts series addresses scenarios of aesthetic inquiry in artistic and curatorial research practices.

TRANSform Master provides a practical and reflective framework for those who want to develop socially committed artistic practices based on forms of co-creation with people who do not define themselves as artists, and whose horizon is social transformation. Alternating between collective work and personal practice, the Master's program trains artists to develop politically situated, sustainable and ethical practices, drawing in particular on critical and feminist pedagogies.