Contemporary Culture Courses in London

From pub crawls to punk rock, via comic books, action painting and Hegelian philosophy; hear the unlikely tale of the Situationists: international artist-revolutionaries who tried to change the world itself into a work of art.

Explore the role of critical theory within the field of art history, and learn new ways of thinking about art by focusing on how recent authors have been rethinking our understanding of nature.

Explore and discuss contemporary art on show in London. Each week we’ll visit 1-2 commercial galleries or a public gallery and examine specific exhibitions of contemporary art across a range of media including painting, works on paper, photography, new media and sculpture.

Explore the work of Chinese artists and filmmakers between the turn of the 20th century to the turn of the 21st as they try to make sense of a world caught on the cusp between the old and the new. What place did art and cinema have in socio-political movements, and how did visual culture reflect the hopes and anxieties of the time?

Underground passions and radical imagery have defined so-called fanzines for over 80 years. From the earliest examples to today, we explore their content, technique and the relation of DIY culture to wider artistic practices.

This Culture course will give you an opportunity to explore the variety of ways that embodiment has been thought and theorised. Across six weeks we will cover a variety of influential approaches to embodied life in the twentieth and twenty-first century, including biopolitics, psychoanalysis, posthumanism, affect theory, science and technology studies, feminism and queer theory.