About us
The Faculty of Arts at the Technical University of Košice was established twenty one years ago on the initiative of several “enlightened” individuals as an art education institution providing higher education in the fields of fine arts, design and architecture. From the outset, the primary mission of the Faculty has been to stimulate artistic education, and to initiate and support various artistic and cultural activities in Košice and its region. And today we can state that this ambition has been successfully fulfilled, even at a national and, to some extent,at an international level.
With the arrival of new social challenges, the faculty has set itself a challenging goal - to become one of the leaders of the creative industry development in the Eastern Slovakia region. The position of the Faculty of Arts with a creative education program at the Technical University is unique in our context and directly evokes the need to link art, science and technology. As the transformation of the region's economy into a knowledge and creative one is part of the long-term strategy of the Technical University of Košice, this task has become a core and key role for the Faculty of Arts.
After two decades of existence of the faculty, we can say with certainty that it is a stabilized and established art and educational institution recognized in the domestic and foreign contexts, which has a significant impact especially on shaping the current cultural identity of the region. Its activities are unmistakable in the creation and implementation of major cultural and artistic projects in the region, which are among the dominant. The Faculty of Arts was one of the main partners of the project Košice - European Capital of Culture 2013 and in 2017 it became a member of the consortium of the international project of world importance - UNESCO / Creative City of Media Arts.
The Faculty of Arts contributes to the development of the artistic environment of Košice also through several socially recognized artistic groups or gallery projects, which are supported by our graduates or educators: Make Up Gallery focusing on contemporary visual art (2007 - 2015), DIG gallery focusing on contemporary media art (since 2012) or multi-genre platform Kotolňa (since 2014) in the area of former Košice tobacco. The uniqueness of our faculty is truly perceptible in the metropolis of the East, but our graduates are spreading the “legacy of the school” also in the wider region, whether it is the alternative Subteren space in Michalovce (2007 - 2014), or type. These activities clearly declare that the Faculty of Arts has been successfully implementing and fulfilling its creative program since its inception and has a significant impact on the cultural and artistic life of Eastern Slovakia.
The increasingly intensive digitalization of society brings new challenges and inevitably enters the process of artistic education. From this point of view, it is no longer possible to follow only the classical principles and methods used so far. Interdisciplinary dialogue and strategies must be developed to enable closer links between art and science and become an important element of artistic education and research, especially in correlation with the TUKE university campus. One of the other missions of our faculty will be the gradual implementation of interdisciplinary projects within the pedagogical process, which envisage cooperation with technically oriented workplaces of the university in the spirit of the current term "Art & Science".
On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Faculty of Arts TUKE in 2018, an almanac in Slovak and English was published, which can be downloaded in "PDF format".