‘DreaMFActory’ is an interim exhibition of work by students from the MFA Fine Art programme at Oxford Brookes. The show provides an opportunity for these students to test out a range of differing works and projects, some complete and some in progress. Participants in DreaMFActory come from varying disciplinary and cultural backgrounds and include artists from the UK, Chile, Iran, Portugal and the USA. Their work demonstrates a critical engagement with wide ranging concepts and interests ranging from: the authoritative power of text nostalgia and cultural appropriation in the era of Brexit, to the overlooked cultural value of carpet weavers in Iran and human bodies relative to architectural spaces. Other works demonstrate an interest in the curiosity of the everyday providing new ways to address familiar subjects, objects and materials, pushing these to extremes of creative possibilities through practices that ‘exhaust the subject’.

The MFA Fine Art at Brookes is a broad-based programme that includes practice, critical theory and professional studies and supports our students to develop their own distinctive artistic practice alongside and integrated into a taught theoretical and professional framework.
The programme provides an inclusive contemporary curriculum that encourages critical engagement, imaginative exploration and creative risk taking. Our students develop and enhance their independent art practice within an environment designed to enable each student to engage with issues relevant to critical, current contexts and debates. They each locate their practice within wider frames of contemporary art and its social, cultural and historical contexts and promote the subject as a versatile and inclusive academic discipline.