IT

The rooms of SMAC San Marco Art Center host “The Quantum Effect”, the exhibition that combines science, art and science fiction in an immersive journey curated by Daniel Birnbaum and Jacqui Davies.

In the heart of San Marco’s Square, the new SMAC San Marco Art Centre ‒ opened in early 2025 ‒ hosts a project that redefines the boundaries between art, science and film. The Quantum Effect, conceived and co-curated by Daniel Birnbaum and Jacqui Davies, presents itself as an authentic quantum experience: an expository experiment in which the concepts of entanglement, supersymmetry and multiple realities are translated into spatial form.
Created in collaboration with OGR Torino, the exhibition explores the paradoxes of quantum physics ‒ parallel universes, time travel, teleportation, dark matter ‒ to build an immersive environment where works, images and spectators behave like particles in constant correlation. The interior of SMAC becomes an optical machine with over eighty meters of corridors and sixteen rooms arranged symmetrically on the sides of a central axis. The focus is Isa Genzken’s work Oil VII (2007) – a kind of gravitational knot. From here the exhibition splits, creating two mirror sequences perceived as parallel worlds. The spectator thus finds themself experiencing a form of perceptive supersymmetry, in which each work has its own double potential, an alternative vision of itself.

THE QUANTUM EFFECT: EXHIBITION DISPLAY AND CURATORSHIP

The exhibition is inspired by Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus, a novel in which eight tableaux vivant follow one another in a glass house. Similarly, The Quantum Effect builds a narrative architecture of self-contained exhibition “stations”, each suspended between science and imagination. The exhibition functions as a fragmented tale, within which the viewer traverses spaces that seem simultaneously real and virtual.
Birnbaum and Davies, drawing on their experience in cinema and visual arts, transform curating into directing. The works of artists such as Jeff Koons, Mark Leckey, Isa Genzken, Tomás Saraceno, Sturtevant and Dara Birnbaum are intertwined with installations and audiovisual collages signed by the curators themselves, who take on the role of author-performers. The distinction between those who exhibit and those who organize dissolves. The effect is that of a quantum montage: each room is a variation on the theme, a micro-reality connected to the others by invisible laws. Curatorship becomes a performative act, capable of merging aesthetic research and theoretical reflection. Nothing is fixed, nothing is linear. Everything happens “in superposition”: the works look at each other, duplicate and are rewritten.

THE QUANTUM EFFECT AT SMAC IN VENICE

The Quantum Effect is not a simple exhibition of contemporary art, but an experience that undermines the very notion of reality. The visitor is invited to choose their own trajectory, to move between possible worlds as in a mental experiment. Thus, SMAC establishes itself as a new Venetian center dedicated to interdisciplinary research, where art does not illustrate science but stages it, makes it a sensitive experience. The result is a quantum museum: unstable, mirror-like and at the same time perfectly consistent with its ambition to explore the boundaries of contemporary imagination.

Valeria Eneide

The Quantum Effect exhibition at SMAC San Marco Art Centre