Eszter Szép

Picture This! – Introduction into critical visual culture studies, Milestone Institute, Budapest

The aim of this course is to complicate the students’ understanding of images and how visual communication works. We question our relationship to art as European spectators. The course helps students to familiarize themselves with theoretical frameworks of art criticism and visual culture studies. Students are required to read theoretical texts, collect images and reflect on them in our discussion forum week by week. The course is taught in English.

Academic writing

I also teach a biweekly academic writing workshop (in English).

Storytelling with Comics (MA course)
Department of Animation, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest

Participants of the course will read a number of comics in various genres, will make short comics, and will also work on a longer comics project. There is a chance that the longer comics projects will be exhibited at the end of the term. The course is practice based, there are weekly creative assignments and readings. Aims:

• Experiencing comics as a way of thinking, as a process of design, and as a practice of storytelling
• Participants will experiment with multimodal storytelling in comics, that is, using words and images to tell a story, and will experience that in comics design cannot be separated from the more verbal parts of the narrative.
• Experiencing the creative challenges of comics making: writing text and dialogue, finding the visual rhythm of scenes, creating layout that matches form and content
• Making our own comics
• Verbalizing and reflecting on how a story is structured and told in comics

What Are You Looking At? – A course on art and visual culture
Milestone Institute, Budapest

The aim of this course is to complicate our understanding of and relationship to art and works of art. The course helps students to familiarize themselves with theoretical frameworks of art criticism and visual culture studies. Students learn about and try out several approaches of discussing images. Though the course has a focus on Western painting, we will also consider images in other media, and images that are not art. Students read texts and watch videos by leading contemporary art historians and thinkers. Each class is organized around a different question, students are required to collect images and reflect on them for each and every class. Syllabus in English. [Image: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt van Rijn]

Humans and Animals
Institute for Theoretical Studies, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest

This course surveys the relationship between humans and nature, humans and non-human animals with the help of contemporary philosophies of the Anthropocene. In focus is how this relationship is represented in art. Each class focuses on a different problem (eg. collections and collecting, maps, landscapes) that we will discuss in class. There will be practical in-class assignments, groupwork, and weekly homework, too. A third of the class is devoted to an award-winning Hungarian novel, Irha és Bőr by Anita Moskát – the author will visit us, too. The aim of the course is to inspire students in the creative work they undertake as students of graphic design, animation, photography, etc – and beyond, in their non-institutionalized artistic practice. Syllabus in Hungarian. [Image: Tyger King, Netflix]

Making Comics, Thinking Comics
Department of Animation, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest

This is a redesigned version of my Thinking, Story, Design course in Autumn 2021. Our focus is on making comics in a playful way, linking drawing and design to a way of thinking, reading comics week by week, building a critical vocabulary that helps students reflect on their own work and analyze other’s comics. By the end of the course, students have experimented with various forms and constraints in their weekly comics making practices, have designed their own comics project on a building of their choice, have given regular constructive feedback to others, have received regular constructive feedback, and have completed their 4-page comic. The course is attended by students of animation, media design, and design theory. Syllabus in Hungarian. [Image by Tom Houghomat.]

The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Art and Ethics after 1960
Institute for Theoretical Studies, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest

We discuss ethical questions raised in the second part of the 20th century and in the 21st century with the help of artistic products in diverse media (film, painting, installation, photography). Our topics include the banality of evil, Milgram’s experiments, Doris Salcedo’s art, public art, environmental ethics, comics journalism, photographing illness, and the work of art in the age of biocybernetic reproduction (following W.J.T. Mitchell). Syllabus in Hungarian. [Image: Cliff Joseph: My Country Right or Wrong]

Comics and Storytelling one-week workshop
Department of Animation, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest

An intensive practical workshop for students of animation. The course is designed to support students in their animation project about “the meaning of life,” which is an overarching theme for the term. We do creative exercises that help students experiment with the specific characteristics of the medium of comics, our focus is on designing time and space of the page. Students also do creative writing exercises to explore the characters they will work with in their “the meaning of life” projects and make experimental comics about them. We also read short comics (excerpts from Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Majen Kerbaj’s Beirut Won’t Cry, and two zines by Kerbaj, Cloud and Cola.) Syllabus in Hungarian. [Image: comics by the students]

Chapters from the History of Comics – lecture
Department of Visual Communication, Budapest Metropolitan University

Lecture series about the history of comics, topics include production and gender in the 19^th century (on the example of recently redeiscovered Marie Duval), the birth of the comic book and WW2, comics and the fear of losing children’s innocence, the graphic novel, comics in Hungary, digital contexts. [Image: The Happy Hooligan by F. B. Opper.]