Mailing List


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...

LowerGreen is situated in the unlikely surroundings of a near-dead mall in Norwich It is not just any mall, but Anglia Square Shopping Centre: a decaying quondam monument to Modernism circa-1970, in which the architecture calls to mind a cross between a spaceship and an office building from the science fiction film Brazil (1985) – severe, oppressive, featureless at first glance, and possessed of certain smooth, seductive lines at second stare There is a bargain store that sells tote bags pitched unintentionally in the key of Barbara Kruger, with the brilliantly apropos slogan WHEN I DON’T SHOP I FEEL EMPTY, and a cinema called, with some irony, The Hollywood ‘In July, 2013,’ boasts Wikipedia, ‘the cinema hosted the world premiere of Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa’   It is difficult to say why Anglia Square Shopping Centre is appealing, in the same way it is difficult to pinpoint the appeal of certain human faces (The French, in coining jolie laide to describe women who are ugly but incredibly alluring, may have come the closest to elucidating this specific feeling, even if they did not necessarily intend it to describe a building) It is Brutalist, but not in the more elegant mode that tends to be salivated over by the kind of people who WhatsApp each other listings from The Modern House, or regularly eat bone marrow at St John’s, or give their children names like ‘Clementine’ It is extravagant and stately in its ugliness It is unfortunately very, very doomed LowerGreen’s final show will be this spring, thanks to a planned destruction of the shopping centre by the City Council; the area’s redevelopment is slated to cost £271 million, roughly equivalent to 54,308,617 tickets to see Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa at The Hollywood, or 184,000,000 oddly-existential tote bags Weston Homes – the developer whose aim is to replace it with ‘1,234 new homes, a leisure quarter with a cinema, car parks, a 200-bed hotel, [and] a tower block’ – have described the proposed plan as being like ‘Marmite’, which is an especially euphemistic way to say that of the 939 comments submitted to

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

Interview

Issue No. 8

Interview with Sophie Calle

Timothée Chaillou

Interview

Issue No. 8

Sophie Calle is France’s most celebrated conceptual artist. Her highly autobiographical, multi-disciplinary work combines the confessional and the cerebral,...

feature

September 2013

Outside the Uniform

Kaya Genç

feature

September 2013

I.   The first time I had to wear a uniform I looked like a madman struggling against a...

Art

August 2017

Becoming Alice Neel

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required