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I like watching birds and they like watching me

Overview

Reflecting the contemporary world

Key details

  • 180 credits
  • 1 year programme
  • Full-time study
School or Centre
Location
  • Battersea
Next open event
Round 1 application deadline
  • 13 Jan 2025

Engage critically with the world through contemporary art

  • Join our vibrant RCA CAP community of high-performing, ambitious and exploratory artists
  • Develop your artwork within a critical and supportive context, addressing social, cultural and ethical issues
  • Experiment with modes of making and examine speculative futures through your art and world-building

Challenge your thinking. Uncover new ways of responding to the world by blending theory with making. Create contemporary artworks using various media, including installation, moving image, performance, and emerging technologies.

We’ve designed this programme to help you explore the artist’s multifaceted role as a creative and socially engaged practitioner. Through individual tutorials, group critiques and collaborative events, you’ll contribute to discussions about the role of art practice in contemporary socio-political debates. And you’ll be encouraged to redefine and position your art practice.

Widen your horizons

Join London's vibrant art scene as a context for creating and showcasing your work, engaging with the city's diverse cultural landscape. Exhibition and performance opportunities such as our CAP Festival include opportunities to experience curating and showcasing your art to the public.

By building a global network of RCA CAP peers and professionals, you'll unlock a wide range of career possibilities, whether you choose to advance your contemporary art practice or explore new avenues in practice-led research.

Catch the replays from our latest online Open Day.

Gallery

Staff

Teaching staff are subject to change.

Facilities

The School of Arts & Humanities is located across our Battersea and Kensington sites.

View all facilities

All full-time students on fine or applied arts programmes are provided with studios or workspace, and access to specialist workshops. There are a number of bookable seminar and project spaces across the site available to all Arts & Humanities students.

  • RCA2022, installation view

    Julie Dusuel and Loretta London, RCA2022 (installation view)

  • RCA2022 (installation view)

    Sara Sarshar, RCA2022 (installation view)

  • RCA2022 (installation view)

    Deividas Vytautas and Laura Nicholson, RCA2022 (installation view)

  • RCA2022 (installation view)

    Bea Grant and Gaby Jonna, RCA2022 (installation view)

  • RCA2022 (installation view)

    JungEun Yang and Weining Cai, RCA2022 (installation view)

  • CAP RCA2021 Degree Show at Cromwell Place

    CAP RCA2021 Degree Show at Cromwell Place. Photographer: Ollie Harrop

More details on what you'll study.

Find out what you'll cover in this programme.

What you'll cover

The programme fosters flexible collective learning. Throughout your studies, you’ll be supported by individual tutorials, group critiques, lectures, seminars and workshops, with critical feedback from world-leading contemporary artists, writers and curators. The curriculum is tailored to nurture the development of your art practice from the earliest manifestations of ideas to platforms for exhibition and making-public while providing the skills required to situate your practice within current material, technological and philosophical debates.

Download the Contemporary Art Practice 2024/25 programme specification (PDF)

The programme is delivered across three terms and includes a combination of programme, School and College units.

Term 1

Situating Contemporary Art Practice (45 credits)

This introductory unit provides the practical and theoretical foundations of the programme. A series of programme lectures, practical and generative workshops and seminars, individual tutorials and group sessions will support you in the production and experimentation of artworks, helping you to position and situate your practice within contemporary dialogues and debates.

Terms 1&2

AcrossRCA (30 credits)

Across terms 1 and 2, you will participate in AcrossRCA. This unit aims to support you to meet the challenges of a complex, uncertain and changing world by bringing you together to work collaboratively in cross-programme interdisciplinary teams. In your team you will develop a self-initiated themed project, informed by expertise within and beyond the College. These projects will challenge you to collectively use your intellect and imagination to address key cultural, social, environmental and economic challenges. In doing so, you will develop and reflect on the abilities required to translate knowledge into action, and help demonstrate the contribution that the creative arts can make to our understanding and experience of the world.

Term 2

Demonstrating Contemporary Art Practice (30 credits)

This unit engages with modes of making-public and with collaborative practices. You will have the opportunity to expand professional networks and engage with sites and contexts of art production and reception. You will be supported in your learning through individual and group tutorials, lectures, workshops and reading groups. You will also have the opportunity to collaborate with peers across all aspects of planning and delivery of a series of public projects and events which may involve external partners and also deliver a presentation of your work in the form of an artist Talk.

Urgency of the Arts (15 credits)

In term 2, School of Arts & Humanities Master's students will participate in a School-wide unit The Urgency of the Arts. In this unit we ask how arts and humanities research and practice can engage with our current socio-political climate, and how might it shape, be necessary and essential in contemporary cultural debates.

The unit introduces you to a diverse range of perspectives, approaches and methods relevant to contemporary practice and thought in the arts and humanities. The delivery, predominantly based on workshops and featuring specialist presentations by leading artists, aims to assist you in recognising, questioning, expanding, and reevaluating your own artistic practices and disciplinary assumptions. Through interactions with staff and students from across the School, as well as through a variety of methodological approaches, you will develop an understanding of the contemporary concerns that shape and influence artistic practice. You will be encouraged to reflect on these as a means to articulate the potential of your own work within the context of broad cultural landscapes and urgent cultural debates.

Term 3

Independent Research Project (60 credits)

The Independent Research Project (IRP) is an opportunity to build a body of work that addresses the key ambitions of your research and practice. You will work towards presenting a work or works in the IRP Public Exhibition, which enables you to explore how you can activate your work in a public context, experiment with the most appropriate forms of realising your ideas and gain critical feedback. The IRP exhibition will be followed by a period of reflection and further development, which emphasises planning for continued practice and research post-graduation.

You will produce a final artwork for presentation in a public exhibition. You will be supported through individual and group tutorials and one-to-one technical support, alongside a series of programme-specific and School-wide professional practice lectures and workshops, with critical feedback on your work via an external group of arts professionals.

Download the Contemporary Art Practice 2024/25 programme specification (PDF)

AcrossRCA is a compulsory 30-credit unit which is delivered as part of all MA programmes.

Situated at the core of your RCA experience, this ambitious interdisciplinary College-wide unit supports you in responding to the challenges of complex, uncertain and changing physical and digital worlds. Developed in response to student feedback, AcrossRCA creates an exciting opportunity for you to collaborate meaningfully across programmes.

Challenging you to use your imagination and intellect to respond to urgent contemporary themes, this ambitious unit will provide you with the opportunity to:

  • make connections across disciplines
  • think critically about your creative practice
  • develop creative networks within and beyond the College
  • generate innovative responses to complex problems
  • reflect on how to propose ideas for positive change in local and/or global contexts

AcrossRCA launches with a series of presentations and panel discussions from acclaimed speakers who will introduce the themes and act as inspirational starting points for your collaborative team response.

Delivered online and in-person across two terms, the unit has been designed to complement your disciplinary studies and to provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.

AcrossRCA

Requirements

What you need to know before you apply

Candidates are selected entirely on merit and applications are welcomed from all over the world. The selection process considers creativity, imagination and innovation as demonstrated in your portfolio, as well as your potential to benefit from the programme and to achieve high MA standards overall.

Candidates are generally expected to have a good BA degree from a fine art course. You should be able to demonstrate an original and critical approach to fine art as well as an ability to engage with current theories of art and culture that inform their practice.

What's needed from you

Please note this information relates to the 2024/25 academic year and may be updated for 2025/26 – more information will be available when applications open in October 2024.

We invite you to submit a curated selection of your recent practice. The examples can be in any media or form reflecting the multi-disciplinary nature of the Contemporary Art Practice MA programme.

All works may have a consistent form (e.g. a selection of photographic works) or be different. Video or sound work should be edited extracts no longer than five minutes each. Alongside the examples of your work, we would like you to describe how your work is situated within, or engages with, the histories/futures, theories and production of contemporary art.

Let us know what thinkers, writers and artists interest you and speculate upon why this is so. We would like to hear about your opinions and thoughts on global, social and political issues; in what way does your work and practice engage with crucial concerns - either personal and/or global?

Introduce us to your work and speculate on how your artworks address this or respond to it; this could be through the use of different processes, material choices, technologies, sites, interventions with groups or publics, critical writing, performance and the performative.

We are committed to decolonising the institutions of art and education; our current students work with a range of ideas regarding class, race, gender (feminism and trans) and disability.

Please note this information relates to the 2024/25 academic year and may be updated for 2025/26 – more information will be available when applications open in October 2024.

You must submit a video of no more than two minutes as part of the application process.

In the video, we want to hear why you want to study MA Contemporary Art Practice at the RCA. We encourage you to use this opportunity to situate your practice within the social, political and economic conditions of the contemporary world; identifying what art can contribute to ongoing material, critical, technological, and philosophical debates.

Discourse is a key aspect of 21st-century art production, and we expect you to be involved in navigating the relationship of art and the function of art's discourse for art's reception. In this two-minute video, please respond to the above statements and elaborate on the questions previously asked about your work and practice as documented in your portfolio.

If you are not a national of a majority English-speaking country you will need the equivalent of an IELTS Academic or UKVI score of 6.5 with a 6.0 in the Test of Written English (TWE) and at least 5.5 in other skills. Students achieving a grade of at least 6.0, with a grade of 5.5 in the Test of Written English, may be eligible to take the College’s English for Academic Purposes course to enable them to reach the required standard.

You are exempt from this requirement if you have received a 2.1 degree or above from a university in a majority English-speaking nation within the last five years.

If you need a Student Visa to study at the RCA, you will also need to meet the Home Office’s minimum requirements for entry clearance.

Find out more about English-language requirements

Fees & funding

For this programme

Fees for new students

Fees for September 2025 entry on this programme are outlined below. From 2021 onward, EU students are classified as Overseas for tuition fee purposes.

Home
(subsidised)
£15,150 *
Overseas and EU
£37,000 *

Deposit

New entrants to the College will be required to pay a non-refundable deposit in order to secure their place. This will be offset against the tuition fees.

Home
£1,000
Overseas and EU
£2,000

Progression discount

For alumni and students who have completed an RCA Graduate Diploma and progress onto an RCA Master's programme – MA, MA/MSc, MFA, MDes, MArch, MEd or MRes – within 10 years, a progression discount of £1,000 is available.

* Total cost is based on the assumption that the programme is completed in the timeframe stated in the programme details. Additional study time may incur additional charges.

Scholarships

Scholarships

The RCA scholarship programme is growing, with hundreds of financial awards planned for the 2025/6 academic year.

Applying for a scholarship

For more information and examples of financial awards offered in 2024/25, visit the Scholarships & awards webpage.

You must hold an offer to study on an RCA programme in order to make a scholarship application in Spring 2025. A selection of RCA merit scholarships will also be awarded with programme offers. 

We strongly recommend that you apply for your programme as early as possible to stand the best chance of receiving a scholarship. You do not apply directly for individual awards; instead, you will be invited to apply once you have received an offer.

More information

Additional fees

In addition to your programme fees, please be aware that you may incur other additional costs associated with your study during your time at RCA. Additional costs can include purchases and services (without limitation): costs related to the purchase of books, paints, textiles, wood, metal, plastics and/or other materials in connection with your programme, services related to the use of printing and photocopying, lasercutting, 3D printing and CNC. Costs related to attending compulsory field trips, joining student and sport societies, and your Convocation (graduation) ceremony. 

If you wish to find out more about what type of additional costs you may incur while studying on your programme, please contact the Head of your Programme to discuss or ask at an online or in person Open Day.   

We provide the RCASHOP online, and at our Kensington and Battersea Campuses – this is open to students and staff of the Royal College of Art only to provide paid for materials to support your studies. 

We also provide support to our students who require financial assistance whilst studying, including a dedicated Materials Fund.

External funding

There are many funding sources, with some students securing scholarships and others saving money from working. It is impossible to list all the potential funding sources; however, the following information could be useful.

Payments

Tuition fees are due on the first day of the academic year and students are sent an invoice prior to beginning their studies. Payments can be made in advance, on registration or in two instalments.

Start your application

Change your life and be here in 2025. Applications now open.

The Royal College of Art welcomes applicants from all over the world.

Before you begin

1.
Make sure you've read and understood the entrance requirements and key dates
More information about eligibility and key dates
2.
Check you have all the information you need to apply.
Read our application process guide
3.
Consider attending an Open Day, or one of our portfolio or application advice sessions
See upcoming sessions
4.
Please note, all applications must be submitted by 12 noon on the given deadline.
Visit our applicant portal to get started

Ask a question

Get in touch if you’d like to find out more or have any questions.

Register your interest with us here
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