What if reality is far less solid than we like to think? That is the question behind The Quantum Effect, a major exhibition opening at OGR Torino this week. Housed in the city’s vast former railway workshops, the show turns the strange ideas of quantum physics, from parallel universes to entanglement, into something you can walk through, look into and feel. It opens on the evening of 30 October, coinciding with Turin’s Artissima art fair, and runs until 25 February 2027.
Where physics meets the gallery
The exhibition is curated by Daniel Birnbaum, the Swedish curator well known on the international art circuit, and Jacqui Davies, a London-based curator and film producer. Produced by OGR Torino together with SMAC Venice, it first appeared in Venice in 2025 and now returns in a new, site-specific form designed for OGR’s Binario 1 hall. The line-up includes Cerith Wyn Evans, Isa Genzken, Tomás Saraceno, Mark Leckey, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Elaine Sturtevant and Man Ray.
Speaking to Vanity Fair Italia, the curators explained that science is not used here as decoration or as a set of formulas to be turned into pretty pictures. Instead, art, film, experimental devices and mathematical equations sit side by side, each kept in its own language. Davies stressed that every one of these languages is valid in its own right, rather than one simply illustrating another. Birnbaum, for his part, values art’s ability to create experiences that come before words and resist neat explanation.
A monolith and an infinity room
Holding the whole show together is one of the most famous images of twentieth-century cinema: the black monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It inspires both the route through the exhibition and the accompanying book, published by Verlag Walther und Franz König and shaped to echo the monolith’s silhouette. A film programme with Turin’s Museo Nazionale del Cinema extends the theme on screen.
The emotional high point is likely to be Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room, The Eternally Infinite Light of the Universe Illuminating the Quest for Truth, where light and endless reflections blur the line between the visitor and the cosmos. It touches on the show’s central puzzle: does reality exist apart from the person observing it? As Davies put it, the viewer is never outside the artwork. Entry to the mirror room is by timed slot, so OGR asks everyone to book online, and a combined ticket covers both the room and the main exhibition.
If the idea of light that seems to go on for ever appeals, it has a quieter echo in jewellery. The soft inner glow of moonstone earrings, the shifting play of colour in opal rings, a deep-blue sapphire pendant that recalls a night sky, or the many facets of multi-gemstone rings all catch and return the light in their own small way.
Sources: Vanity Fair Italia, OGR Torino, e-flux.
