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Alex Quicho
Alex Quicho is the author of Small Gods (Zero Books, 2021), a book on the terror and transcendence of drone technology. She has written for the White Review, the New Inquiry, Wired, Vogue, Bookforum, and others, and worked with institutions including Singapore Art Museum, Power Station of Art (Shanghai), Julia Stoschek Collection (Berlin), Somerset House (London), Rennie Museum (Vancouver), and Nationalgalerie (Berlin). She is an associate lecturer in speculative futures at Central Saint Martins.

Articles Available Online


Without World

Essay

June 2023

Alex Quicho

Essay

June 2023

‘I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate...

Art Review

December 2020

End Times: Heather Phillipson’s ‘The End’

Alex Quicho

Art Review

December 2020

A huge swirl of whipped cream, garnished with a drone, a fly, and a maraschino cherry: so insistent that...

Secularity, the theme of this year’s Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA), is often imagined as something akin to the cartilage between two vertebrae: a tissue that separates church from state But what would it mean to consider secularity not as tissue but as bone, as a structure that stands alongside civic and religious society? What, then, can we say secular culture looks like? Does it have a time, a space, an aesthetic of own?   Featuring 30 artists spread across two main venues, Röda Sten and Göteborgs Konsthall, as well as a number of off-site spaces, the biennial’s ninth edition focuses largely on artists and histories connected to Scandinavia Curator Nav Haq borrowed the title, ‘WheredoIendandyoubegin’, from a light installation by Shilpa Gupta, which glows atop a building in an industrial no-man’s land between the city and the suburbs Applied to the theme of this year’s GIBCA, Gupta’s question expands the field of secularity beyond the chasm between church and state, to the more immediate difference between ‘you’ and ‘I’   On the occasion of the biennial, Platform for Artistic Research Sweden (PARSE) have published a discussion on secularity, between Haq and two professors at the University of Gothenburg, Andrea Phillips and Ola Sigurdson In this discussion Haq, an Antwerp-based Brit, describes Sweden’s second city as one full of contradictions: at once working class and incredibly bourgeois; of a social-democratic persuasion yet remarkably socially segregated Such contradictions are laid bare in Sicherheit (2017), a video installation at Göteborgs Konsthall by Ellen Nyman, Corina Oprea and Saskia Holmkvist, which shows refugees living in accommodation directly adjacent to a site of Sweden’s immense weapon industry Combining vox populi with testimony from asylum seekers, the work illustrates how the benevolence and tolerance frequently associated with Swedish society exist alongside the simultaneous and active production of crisis elsewhere in the world   One of a three-part video installation at Röda Sten, Stone Wall Nation (2014) is a cinematic short by Norwegian artist Sille Storihle, in which an actor re-performs an interview with the gay rights activist Don Jackson, originally conducted in 1986 Back in 1970, Johnson had

Contributor

July 2018

Alex Quicho

Contributor

July 2018

Alex Quicho is the author of Small Gods (Zero Books, 2021), a book on the terror and transcendence of...

Emily Pope, The Sitcom Show

Art Review

July 2018

Alex Quicho

Art Review

July 2018

Emily Pope’s five-part web series, The Sitcom Show, is a throwback to the chameleonic class-consciousness and wry pessimism-as-realism embodied by the vein of British pop culture...

READ NEXT

feature

September 2015

Immigrant Freedoms

Benjamin Markovits

feature

September 2015

My grandmother, known to us all as Mutti, caught one of the last trains out of Gotenhafen before the...

poetry

January 2016

Meteorite

Liliana Colanzi

TR. Frances Riddle

poetry

January 2016

The meteorite retraced its orbit in the solar system for fifteen million years until a passing comet pushed it...

fiction

May 2016

Panty

Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay

TR. Arunava Sinha

fiction

May 2016

She was walking. Along an almost silent lane in the city.   Work – she had abandoned her work...

 

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