Emma Starkey

Emma Starkey is a Birmingham-based live artist developing alternatives to positivist modes of knowledge sharing in educational and artistic spaces. Her work challenges the colonial assumption that knowledge is something delivered from an authorised voice to a passive audience. Instead, she positions knowledge as relational — emerging between bodies, conditions, and the specific dynamics of a shared moment.

Through site-responsive, unrehearsed actions, she resists institutional demands for knowledge to be “polished” or fixed in text or image in order to be considered legitimate. Her performances create situations where meaning is co-produced, unstable, and felt rather than captured. Starkey’s practice foregrounds embodied, anti-extractive forms of knowing and relating that cannot be easily appropriated or turned into institutional capital.

She works from the belief that movement reveals nuances that are beautifully idiosyncratic — forms of knowledge that dismantle the idea that only some people hold expertise while others do not. For Starkey, every person carries a universe of knowledge that becomes visible through relation, not hierarchy.

Starkey is currently making live work aimed at dismantling the properties that maintain whiteness. As part of this, she refuses to document her performances, understanding the ephemeral as an epistemic and political movement — a way to dismantle without reinstating, to let knowledge remain unfixed and unpossessable. Whilst undermining whiteness as it relies on the stable, static/ tradition, it relies on the fallacy of the image. 

Click HERE to read some of Emma’s work.