VENICE.- SMAC, the pioneering new arts venue in the heart of Venice, which opened earlier this year announced that the second exhibition, The Quantum Effect, co-curated by Daniel Birnbaum & Jacqui Davies, opened to the public on 5 September 2025. SMAC’s exhibition programme is realised in collaboration with world-class institutions and curators, and this exhibition is produced by SMAC and OGR Torino, a culture and innovation hub in a vast former railway repair building. The Quantum Effect explores spatial and temporal paradoxes introduced by quantum theory: parallel universes, time travel, teleportation, supersymmetry and dark matter. The exhibition includes works by some of today’s most prominent artists woven into a cinematic narrative using imagery from contemporary science and from the worlds of science fiction and pop culture.

Birnbaum and Davies combine artworks, scientific experiments, quantum mechanical equations, and science fiction to create a total quantum effect across 1,000 sq m of exhibition space. The curation draws conceptually on Raymond Roussel’s seminal 1914 novel Locus Solus with its account of eight miraculous tableaux vivants taking place in a glass architecture. Taking a cue from quantum realities, the exhibition signals new creative possibilities where objects and roles can be both one thing and seemingly incompatible others. Besides works by artists such as Dara Birnbaum, Isa Genzken, Jeff Koons, Mark Leckey, and Marcel Duchamp/Man Ray, The Quantum Effect displays curator-made elements - “entangled” cinematic collages of puzzling glimpses from the world of quantum theory and computing, as well as “Science Fiction”, an alternative quantum timeline that, true to the show’s theme, questions the notion of linear time and the nature of reality.

SMAC’s exhibition space is comprised of 16 galleries, arranged along a continuous corridor that stretches over 80m. The Quantum Effect centres around Isa Genzken’s mirror room Oil VII (2007). From this central point, the exhibition unfolds symmetrically, with galleries to the left and right experienced as parallel states, as if the show is happening simultaneously in multiple realities. It in effect becomes possible for viewers to live in one of many possible worlds as they progress through the exhibition’s “supersymmetrical” layout.

Daniel Birnbaum & Jacqui Davies, Co-Curators of The Quantum Effect: “Just as the paradoxical nature of quantum disrupts our understanding of reality, we have produced an exhibition which challenges the nature and meaning of things: artworks, films, scientific experiments, quantum theories and their symbolic representations. Even the discreet roles of curator, producer and artist are upended, with curator-conceived experiment-installations and interventions exhibited alongside acclaimed artists’ works. At times, fact and fiction become blended, key quantum protagonists re-animated and traditional timelines become “Science Fiction”. Extraordinarily, in this world, Davies is commissioned as artist, making works which instrumentalise science fiction cinema, popular culture, social media and more, constructing audio-visual portals between the worlds of art, cinema, science, philosophy and magic.”

Anna Bursaux, David Gramazio and David Hrankovic, Co-Founders, SMAC: “SMAC's exhibition programme continues to shed light on the unexpected with The Quantum Effect, which has been conceived by the curators Daniel Birnbaum & Jacqui Davies. Providing a bridge between the worlds of science, art and cinema, The Quantum Effect highlights the research, dialogue and experimentation that define SMAC's curatorial vision. As with each of the exhibitions at SMAC, The Quantum Effect is realised through a collaborative approach and on this occasion is produced by SMAC and OGR Torino.”

Exhibition highlights

According to the exhibition’s mirror-like structure, each work appears with a twin – sometimes an almost identical doppelgänger.

Highlights include two works by Tomás Saraceno from the Hybrid Webs series, which present spiderwebs contained within vitrines. The artist views the structure of the world as a web interwoven with sensory experiences that combine and collide to encourage communication across the creatures that inhabit our galaxy.

Mark Leckey’s To the Old World (Thank You for the Use of Your Body) (2021-22) is a film installation that captures its protagonist as they crash through the screen of a bus stop. The glass acts as an invisible membrane through which they transition from one world into another.

One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985) is an iconic early work by Jeff Koons. A basketball hovers in a case, suspended between two states made possible due to the fact that everything contained within the glass has the same density. Koons worked with the quantum theorist Richard Feynman to bring the piece into existence.

Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-79) by Dara Birnbaum depicts the super heroine in moments of teleportation, her spinning body changing state from her everyday character to the superhuman power she was known as, as she transitioned easily from one dimension to another.

John McCracken’s otherworldly objects are reminiscent of the enigmatic monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and were described by the artist as the kind of work that could have been brought to earth by a U.F.O.

Man Ray’s 1923 photograph of Marcel Duchamp lying behind his first glass work, “Glissière contenant un moulin à eau (enmétaux voisins) (“Glider Containing a Water Mill [in Neighboring Metals]”) (1913–15), is formally echoed in film works throughout the exhibition.

Jacqui Davies uses the semi-circular glider shape to frame her cinematic interventions that use found footage from science fiction cinema, music and visual culture and imagery of quantum computers. They are seen, as it were, through Duchamp’s first glass object.

Duchamp’s influence continues throughout the exhibition, with Sturtevant’s Duchamp descendant l’escalier (1992) depicting the artist in multiple places and states simultaneously.