Curators Pair Quantum Equations With an Ape Named Brenda at OGR

Mirrors, monoliths and primates make up the case for quantum physics at OGR Torino. The Quantum Effect, a quantum theory art exhibition, runs from October 31, 2026 to February 25, 2027, and it asks visitors to treat uncertainty as a working condition rather than a puzzle to solve.

The show opens with a sequence of mirrored halls that scramble a visitor’s sense of direction. Round the next corner and a projection replays those same halls back to the viewer. Perception itself starts to look unreliable, which is the point the curators want to make.

For another take on technology and art history colliding, see Robin F. Williams’s London Tech Dystopia Exhibition, which handles digital anxiety with a similar sense of unease.

Two curators, three languages

Daniel Birnbaum and Jacqui Davies curated this quantum theory art exhibition. It places work by Mark Leckey, Yayoi Kusama and Tomás Saraceno alongside two foundations of modern physics: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which limits how precisely a particle’s position and momentum can be known at once, and Dirac’s Equation.

Davies describes the logic of the show. “By placing artworks, experiments and equations in dialogue, the exhibition affirms the validity of each of these languages while resisting their collapse into a single explanatory framework,” she says. The title of Ryan Gander’s installation supplies her shorthand for it: a “school of languages” that runs across several sign systems at once.

The curators did not work from intuition alone on the science. They consulted Ulf Danielsson, professor of theoretical physics at Uppsala University and Secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physics, who chose the equations on display. He picked formulas that capture entanglement, superposition, teleportation, parallel universes and the early stages of quantum computing.

Birnbaum says most visitors will not be able to read those equations. “Most of us of course cannot read them but Ulf likes to emphasize their beauty,” he says. The exhibition, he adds, tries to stage these symbolic systems side by side without ranking one above another.

Screens, monoliths and borrowed images

The black monoliths are a deliberate nod to Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey. On their screens, equations give way to clips from The Matrix and Star Trek, and footage of Schrodinger’s cat rises from high on the walls. Davies made the monoliths for a series she calls Cinematic Blossomings.

Davies built the works from memory. She has said she “reassembled fragments [she remembers] from cinema, TV and pop culture to make new film-works which resemble ideas from quantum theory.” The results are not accurate models of physics. They do point toward a shared public picture of how the universe behaves.

Davies argues that audiences already know the look of quantum ideas. “Even if they remain incomprehensible on an analytical level we are all familiar with some of these phenomena,” she says. She points to bodies that shimmer, dematerialize and reappear elsewhere in The Terminator, Star Trek, TRON, Wonder Woman and David Cronenberg’s The Fly.

Birnbaum accepts that the films simplify the science. “Clearly they have sometimes been simplified or even vulgarized, but we are all familiar with visually extremely powerful imagery,” he says. He cites the Many Worlds interpretation, the idea that every quantum outcome branches into a separate reality, as it appears in fiction by Jorge Luis Borges and Philip K. Dick. Paradoxes once confined to physics papers, he argues, now belong to a common imaginary.

Duchamp’s long shadow

Birnbaum places the exhibition’s roots much earlier than the current fashion for quantum art. “Although quantum concepts have become trendy in the artworld in recent years their aesthetic reverberations can be traced throughout the twentieth century,” he says. Marcel Duchamp‘s The Large Glass, which explores multiple dimensions, anchors that argument.

Duchamp’s habits of repetition, fracture and glass recur across this quantum theory art exhibition. One direct reference is a 1923 photograph by Man Ray of Duchamp holding Glissiere Contenant un Moulin a Eau (en metaux voisins), also known as Glider Containing a Water Mill [in Neighbouring Metals], 1913-15. Sturtevant’s Duchamp descendant l’escalier (1992) reworks Nude Descending a Staircase as a black-and-white photograph. Both pieces show a body repeated frame by frame as it crosses the picture.

Glass runs through the rooms as a barrier to another reality. Cerith Wyn Evans’s Phase-shifts )( manifest [after D.T.] (2026) is a mobile of cracked windshields, where D.T. stands for “delay in time.” Mark Leckey’s film To the Old World (Thank You for the Use of Your Body), made in 2021 and 2022, shows a man hurling his body through a bus-stop glass wall. The shards scatter into a dark void on impact.

Davies traces the theme to a specific book. “One of our curatorial starting points was the novel Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel, an early example of what today is called quantum fiction,” she says. In that novel, a scientist leads a party past marvels that are always seen through glass.

Primates before humanity

Duchamp returns in the exhibition’s primate works. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s untitled or (the savage detectives) (2025) shows two man-ape figures crouched on the floor with sticks. They stare at a replica of Duchamp’s Peigne, a comb inscribed with the words “3 or 4 drops from a height have nothing to do with savagery.”

Ryan Gander’s room, which holds School of Languages (2023) and Chronos Kairos 01.01 (2025), carries the theme further. In a white room, an ape named Brenda cowers under a corner desk. Viewers see her only after walking to the far side and looking underneath. A digital clock on the wall reads 88:88, a time that does not exist on a 24-hour clock.

Read together, the primates and the monoliths question a familiar story of human progress. Kubrick’s monolith interrupts linear time, and the curators use that image to challenge the neat sequence from fish to ape to man. Time, they suggest, may be less orderly than the textbook version.

What this quantum theory art exhibition leaves open

Saraceno’s glowing webs bring the argument back to the universe itself. Birnbaum says the artist treats the structures as ciphers. “For Tomas they are ciphers of the universe itself. He can talk for ever about string theory in front of these complex creations by spiders,” he says. “Good art is never just an illustration of theories. But sometimes one detects this strange convergence between languages.”

The quantum theory art exhibition does not try to settle what physics means, and it does not claim that art can explain it. The exhibition leaves its questions open and invites visitors to test their own sense of time, perception and progress against the works.

Absence and unfinished journeys drive the questions in Sophie Calle’s Margate Exhibition on Absence, a useful companion for anyone who left this show with open questions.

This art exhibition also includes work by Isa Genzken, Emilija Skarnulyte, Faustine Studio and Man Ray. The venue’s social account is @ogr_torino, and the show is listed on the OGR Torino site under the title The Quantum Effect, which is where the exhibition’s details are published.

Sources & Links

• @ogr_torino
• INDX|GLOBAL

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