Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research enquiry unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User's Manual, 2023, and in the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2025. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839

Hidden Narratives

Hidden Narratives
19 Jan until 19 Apr
GRAVES ART GALLERY

Susan Hiller, J- Street Project.

I have been commissioned by Dialogue to write a review of 'Hidden Narratives', an exhibition which reveals the narrative urge in contemporary art, exploring how artists create scenarios, characters or scenes in which the viewer is encouraged to construct their own reading. Hidden Narratives features work in different media by artists including Simon Le Ruez, Zarina Bhimji, Susan Hiller and Shizuka Yokomizo, and specially commissioned pieces by Kate Allen and Sophie Lascelles. The review will feature in 'A tricky business: the art of politics, the politics of art', an issue of Dialogue (March 2008 to May 2008) which addresses the idea of art as a site of protest and testimony. This issue of Dialogue examines what it means to be a politically engaged artist. What, if any, are the criteria in the first place – and who sets them? How do artists balance the competing factors of retaining a political edge and being free to pursue their own ideas, with the agendas of art institutions, funding bodies and commercial galleries?

"... A number of artists in the exhibition present domestic spaces or places of inhabitation as the location of these contradictory tensions. In their work they allude to relationships brokered or broken; to lives lived or imagined, to specific and at times ambiguous conditions of existence played out and negotiated between observers and those observed; between the powerful and the powerless. These strange proximities invite closer scrutiny as to the nature of the narrative played out in each context; further interrogation of the way that each narrative has been hidden or concealed. The gesture of hiding can function as an act of both repression and protection; of care and cruelty; of safekeeping and survival, but also one of guilt. Meanings might become lost to moments of individual forgetfulness, whilst selected histories are strategically denied – carefully eradicated by the slow creep of collective amnesia. Hidden narratives can speak then of both poetic and political motivation, where on the one hand they might defer fixed meanings in favour of the potentiality of fluid interpretation; or else signal the mute testimony of voices that have been wilfully silenced and existences that have been methodically cancelled out."

Read more in Dialogue here