Contemporary Art Practice (MA)

Contemporary, critical, public, moving. These words swarm around the CAP vocabulary on a daily basis, none taken for granted. We could also add: community, care, collaboration, action, invention, experimentation, performance, research, response-ability, humour, eroticism, poetry, translation, fictioning, coding, decoding, visibility, agency, identity, speaking with, speaking out, encounters and flesh.

Artist and GSA Professor Ross Sinclair, the current external examiner for our Contemporary Art Practice MA, recently described CAP as being a “fiercely contemporaneous pedagogic programme that continues to interrogate accepted paradigms of art production through the work it encourages and enables its students to make”. “Fiercely contemporaneous” couldn’t be a more apt way of articulating the work of the 58 artists graduating this year.

Keywords are a thing these days, tags and clusters that link us together. Our graduates have these links, but they also share a bond that will linger, even as their vocabulary continues to evolve. Through lockdowns, burst modes and Zooms these artists have not only persevered, but they have demonstrated with grace and eloquence what happens when a group of intelligent, talented and ambitious artists come together to respond to and be responsive to the world around us... and why this matters so much. These artists represent both the contemporary and the future, and they do so fiercely and brilliantly.

Please join us for the CAP special online spectacular: Don’t Watch That, Watch This! CAP TV Pilot and Watershed After Party on the 27th June and for the livestreamed multidisciplinary event Diasporas Now on the 1st of July that will feature artists of Asian, Afro-Caribbean, and Latin American diasporas using performance as radical acts of self-representation. We also warmly welcome you to visit us in person for the Contemporary Art Practice Graduate Exhibition 2021 at Cromwell Place, South Kensington from the 21st to the 25th of July.

Dr Chantal Faust, Head of Programme, Contemporary Art Practice

Instagram: @rca_contemporaryartpractice

Study Contemporary Art Practice at the RCA: rca.ac.uk/study/programme-finder/contemporary-art-practice-ma/