Departments

Main Departments

Sandberg Instituut’s permanent or main departments each develop a distinct pedagogical approach and educational rhythm, supporting students in expanding and deepening their creative and research practices. Through challenging disciplinary boundaries, the departments create opportunities for students to critically reflect on both their work and their relationship to the wider conditions in which they operate. The permanent Departments are:

Critical Studies

The Critical Studies department offers a two-year Master’s programme in critical thought and inquiry. The programme provides an open, interdisciplinary environment for the development of an independent research practice while giving students a grounding in contemporary critical theory.

Design

The Design Department provides a space for new collective imaginaries reflecting the complexity of designed worlds and design’s implications in social, economic, and ecological issues. The curriculum is responsive to the pressing concerns of both students and tutors such as the current planetary crises and prevailing socio material injustices.

Dirty Art Department

The Dirty Art Department offers itself as an open space for all possible thought, creation, and action. It is concerned with individuality, collectivity, and our navigation of the complex relationship between the built world and the natural world and between other people and ourselves. It is a place to build objects or totems, religions or websites, revolutions or business models, paintings or galaxies.

Fine Arts

The Fine Arts Department offers a truly diverse, inclusive, and imaginative context for emerging artists. We offer dedicated time, space, and social structures for each artist to develop their own practice in relation to their peers, the field of art and world at large, and enable them to express intentional and informed positions within society.

Studio for Immediate Spaces

The Studio for Immediate Spaces presents a two-year Master’s programme in art practices in the spatial discourse (MA Interior Architecture) that investigates how ecology, politics and economy influence modes of spatial production and, vice versa, how space shapes life.

Temporary Departments

Each year Sandberg Instituut launches a new Temporary Department in response to emerging urgencies and questions within society, culture and the arts. These are full-time, two-year master’s curricula that run parallel to the permanent departments while introducing new pedagogical approaches, and forms of practice into the institute.

Current temporary departments

Lumbung Practice

Ends 2026

The temporary master's in Lumbung Practice builds on the gained knowledge and experimentations in lumbung-documenta fifteen. Participating collectives practice and learn about lumbung, self-organization, and sociopolitical artistic and curatorial practice, as well as producing alternative art institutions and economies for the future.

Monstrous Futurities

Ends 2027

Monstrous Futurities: Practices in (Un)learning, (Un)making, and (Un)worlding seeks to engage with monstrous imaginaries, their subversive potentialities and material and relational affects in the world through transdisciplinary practices.

Phantom Scores

Ends 2028

Phantom Scores is the new temporary programme held in collaboration with If I Can’t Dance and led by curator and researcher Eva Posas. The programme aims to explore the rich and interdisciplinary field of performance as a research methodology through the phantoms that live in and outside us.