Visual Literacy: Understanding Images across Europe – Past and Present, educational module (4EU+)

Visual Literacy 2025/2026: Application Deadline Extended
New Deadline: 31 October 2025

Between October 2021 and June 2022 the Institute of Art History of the University of Warsaw together with the Charles University in Prague and the University of Milan implemented – as part of the 4EU + Alliance – the one-year educational module “Visual Literacy: Understanding Images across Europe – Past and Present”. The second and third editions of the module were conducted in 2022/2023 and in 2024/2025. Now the new, forth edition is about to start.

The classes conducted within the framework of the module were taught by lecturers from three partner universities:

The module consists of an online conversatory class, an online tutorial and in-person field workshop.

In 2025/2026 students can choose between five tutoring programs:

  • Multiplied Images: Artistic Practices in the Twentieth Century. The aim of this tutorial, led by Davide Colombo, is to analyse different artistic practices in the twentieth century, which were based on appropriation, collage, photomontage, found footage and re-enactment. Heterogeneous and non-artistic images will be examined along with visual sources. The contamination of low and high models, as well as the circulation of contemporary art and artists’ iconic images in media and popular culture will also be addressed.
  • Visual literacy: Between Educational, Artistic and Curatorial Approaches. This is a tutorial conducted by Pavla Gajdošíková and Zuzana Štefková, which will be focused on contemporary art, art education and curating as a form of dialogue and as a way of broadening critical thinking. The students will be researching the contemporary art field and analysing its tendencies, topics or “turns”. On this basis the students will try to develop their own curatorial project together with educational activities (art mediation). The students will be encouraged to their own artistic attempts to understand the attitude of an artist as well.
  • Self-Portraits: Artistic Conventions, Meaning, Identity, and Functions from Early Modern through Modern to Contemporary This tutorial, led by Monika Czekanowska-Gutman, introduces students to the development of self-portraits in pre-modern, modern, and contemporary visual culture, including painting, photography, graphic arts, and social media. Emphasis is placed on formal, iconographic, iconological, and semiotic methods of analysis, as well as on the cross-cultural reception of images across different traditions (Jewish, Christian, Arabic, and others). These approaches will equip students to analyze self-portraits critically in terms of how they construct identity, express psychological aspects of personality, and negotiate presence and absence, among other issues.
  • The Material Culture and Visual Language of Early Modern Games This tutorial, led by Magdalena Herman, explores how printed games from the late 15th to early 18th centuries were made, perceived, and used as interactive, social, and material artifacts. The course focuses primarily on selected examples of card, board, and book games, examining the relationships between these objects, their makers, and the practices surrounding them. While printed games and related gaming artifacts will provide the primary focus, selected case studies may also draw on other artifacts. We will consider the materials, techniques, and forms through which gaming objects were produced, as well as the ways in which they reflected early modern social and cultural practices. The course will also examine how games and gameplay were represented in early modern visual culture. Finally, we will consider the visual language of games themselves and the ways in which images, texts, and material forms contributed to their meaning and experience. The selection of topics and case studies will be adapted, where possible, to the research interests of the participants.
  • Materiality of Colour and Practices in Painters’ Workshops of the Late Middle Ages and Early Modernity. This tutorial, conducted by Karolina Mroziewicz, will explore the physical properties of colours, the economic and cultural value of pigments, their trade routes, and their application in 15th- and 16th-century painters’ workshops. Students will engage in hands-on experiments with paint production and reflect on the conditions that rendered the pre-modern colour palette legible, meaningful, and valuable to contemporary viewers. They will also experience first-hand the challenges and limitations of reconstructing late medieval and early modern paint recipes.

The presentation with practical information about the upcoming edition of the project can be downloaded here.

The classes begin in November 2025.

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