Goldsmiths MFA Fine Art

Come along the Goldsmiths MFA Fine Art Degree show!

Come and study at Goldsmiths MFA Fine Art!

MFA in Fine Art - e-flux Education Call for applications 2025: MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London.

All welcome

Come along to the Goldsmiths MFA Fine Art degree show!

Post-Graduate Art Talk Oct 31st at 5:30pm
Stewart Hall Lecture Theatre LG02

Lenka Vrablikova, Othering Myco-Visions: Fungi in European Colonial Modernity

Fungi have long occupied a highly ambivalent position in human imagination, inciting disgust and fear, as well as wonder and fascination. Neither plants, nor animals, they grow up unexpectedly but also in regular lines or circles. Some of them are medicinal and edible, whereas others are toxic or even poisonous. Sometimes they are both. Drawing form this

ambivalence and mobilising analytics of transnational eco-feminist inquiry, the talk examines traces that fungi and their metaphors leave in the articulations of nationhood, race, gender, and sexuality within the political imaginary of European colonial modernity.

Lenka Vráblíkova is a lecture in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths. Her work lies at the intersection of visual culture studies, transnational feminisms and political ecology, and brings together visual and textual analysis, autoethnography and artivist research. She is particularly interested in examining the role forests, mushrooms and their foragers have played in the cultural and political imagination of European heteropatriarchal and colonial modernity, with the aim to generate new notions of belonging in a world defined by unequally distributed social precarity and ecological emergency. Lenka is a co-founding member of Feminist Readings Network that provides transnational and translingual space to explore feminist, q***r and anti-racist thought, art and pedagogy. Before joining the Department of Visual Cultures, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the College of Human Sciences at UNISA (the University of South Africa).

Auricularia auricula from Roger Phillip's Mushrooms, 2006, p. 348

Post-Graduate Art Talk Tonight, Oct 24th at 5:30pm
Stewart Hall Lecture Theatre LG02

Annalee Davis, A Hymn to the Banished and (bush) Tea Plots of Resistance

From Barbados [Britain's first sugar isle] to the Scottish Highlands, Annalee Davis will explore imperial linkages across centuries of social disruption caused by the monocrop plantation system. Her presentation will respond to the colonial project which prompted the unsustainable exploitation of resources, the eradication of biodiversity leading to ecological degradation, and the vestiges of repressive regimes. Cognisant of the ensuing rupture, friction, and the need to belong in strange places, Annalee will probe rituals of incantations, charms, and the desire to repair the ills of British Empire-era indentureship and slavery through gardening as resistance and a form of agency.

Annalee Davis’ hybrid practice is as a visual artist, cultural activist and writer. Her work sits at the intersection of biography and history, focussing on post-plantation economies by engaging with a particular landscape of Barbados. Her studio, located on a working dairy farm that operated historically as a 17th century sugarcane plantation, offers a critical context for her work. Drawing, walking, making (bush) teas, and growing living apothecaries, Annalee’s practice suggests future strategies for repair and thriving while investigating the role of botanicals and living plots as ancestral sites of refusal, counter-knowledge, community and healing. In 2011, Annalee founded Fresh Milk, an art platform and micro -residency programme. In 2012 she co-founded Caribbean Linked, an annual residency in Aruba, cohering emerging artists, writers, and curators from the Caribbean and Latin America. In 2015, she co-founded Tilting Axis, an independent visual arts platform bridging the Caribbean through annual encounters. Her solo exhibition ‘A Hymn to the Banished’ (2022) at Balmacara’s Steadings Gallery on the Lochalsh estate as part of a year-long commission for the National Trust for Scotland explores historical links between Scotland and Barbados. Annalee is currently working on a living apothecary for the Sharjah Biennale opening in February 2023.

Image credit: Annalee Davis, ‘A Book of Healing Plants’, hardbound book with soft ground etching, screen print & digital print. (detail), 2022. Photo credit: DCA Dundee

Post-Graduate Art Talk Tonight, Oct 17th at 5:30pm!
Sria Chatterjee
Expanded Landscapes: Soil, Air, Art, Politics

This lecture explores how soil and air, both as matter and in representation, have been implicated in colonial and nationalist politics. With a focus on Britain, India, and Australia, the lecture zooms in on examples across the twentieth century into the present. Scaling between the elemental, material and political, I look at works by artists such as Benodebehari Mukherjee,

Amar Kanwar, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, and Jack Green. In thinking through an expanded landscape, we look together, beyond the surface, over and above it, while also critically examining our place in it.

Sria Chatterjee is an art historian and environmental humanities scholar. She is the Head of Research and Learning at The Paul Mellon Centre, London, UK. Sria works at the intersection of art, science and environment with a focus on questions around racial and environmental justice. She founded the online project »Visualizing the Virus« – https://visualizingthevirus.com/ and currently leads the multi-year Climate and Colonialism research project at the Paul Mellon Centre. She holds a PhD from Princeton University (2019).

Image credit: Shweta Bhattad, Faith in Paris performance, 2015.
Photograph from https://gram1202.wixsite.com/faithinparis