The Quantum Effect Opens at OGR Torino with a Yayoi Kusama Infinity Room
A new exhibition in Turin asks what happens to art when the universe stops behaving predictably. Yayoi Kusama's infinity room is the headline, but the ambition runs wider.
On 31 October, OGR Torino opens The Quantum Effect, a large group exhibition on how quantum theory has shaped visual culture, from cinema and popular culture to contemporary art. It runs in Binario 1 from 31 October 2026 until 25 February 2027.
Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room. Eternally Infinite Light of the Universe Illuminating the Quest for Truth, 2020 © YAYOI KUSAMA. Collection of LAS Art Foundation
Photo: Herling, Herling, Werner, Sprengel Museum Hannover, 2025
The show is curated by Daniel Birnbaum and Jacqui Davies and produced by OGR Torino with SMAC Venice, the San Marco Art Centre. SMAC opened in the restored Procuratie on Piazza San Marco, in a David Chipperfield project, in May 2025. It's an interesting partnership: a Turin industrial space, a Venetian newcomer, and a subject that doesn't belong to either city.
OGR Torino, Binario 1 Photo: Michele D’Ottavio for OGR Torino OGR Torino Photo: Luigi De Palma for OGR Torino
The premise
The curators start from a familiar story with a long tail. Quantum physics broke the dream of a predictable cosmos, and its consequences are still unfolding in science, technology and the arts. The exhibition focuses on the spatial and temporal paradoxes the theory introduced: entanglement, parallel universes, teleportation and dark matter. These are ideas that have fed popular imagination for decades, and artists have long been drawn to them for obvious reasons. They unsettle where things are, when they happen and whether the observer can ever be separated from what's observed.
Three languages
The most distinctive thing about the project is its structure. Rather than simply hanging artworks around a scientific theme, the show brings together three separate modes of expression: the language of art and cinema, the language of scientific experiments, and the language of equations.
The equations are a notable part of this. The key ones, presented as symbolic representations of quantum theories, have been assigned by Professor Ulf Danielsson, Secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physics. The exhibition therefore combines artworks, films and actual experiments with the mathematical notation behind the theories. Visitors are invited to move between these registers and to see where they connect and where they don't.
The artists
The list of participants is wide-ranging: Cerith Wyn Evans, Isa Genzken, Mark Leckey, Tomás Saraceno, Emilija Škarnulytė, Sturtevant, Man Ray and Rirkrit Tiravanija, among others. Davies also presents cinematic devices of her own alongside these works.
The names suggest a deliberate mix of generations and approaches. Man Ray belongs to the early twentieth-century avant-garde, which was itself fascinated by new science. Sturtevant, known for repeating other artists' works, brings questions of repetition and originality that echo the theory's own puzzles about identity and observation. Saraceno has long worked at the meeting point of art, architecture and science, and Wyn Evans, Genzken, Leckey, Škarnulytė and Tiravanija come at the subject from very different directions. The press release doesn't spell out which works will be shown, so the details will become clear when the show opens.
Kusama's infinity
The highlight is a presentation of Infinity Mirrored Room – The Eternally Infinite Light of the Universe Illuminating the Quest for Truth (2020) by Yayoi Kusama, shown as part of OGR's wider Quantum programme. OGR calls her one of the most celebrated artists of our time.
Kusama's mirrored rooms work through light, reflection and endless repetition. Inside, the visitor is surrounded by an apparently boundless field, and the usual markers of distance and edge disappear. The exhibition text describes the room as an invitation to think about infinity, the perception of space, and the dissolution of the boundaries between the self and the universe. In a show about physics, it's a kind of experiment you take part in with your own body, and no equation is needed to feel what it's about.
Kubrick’s monolith and the book
The other recurring image is the black monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The press release describes it as one of the cinematic references behind the curatorial vision, and as a key element of the exhibition itself. It’s a fitting choice. The monolith is almost nothing, a plain dark slab, and yet it sets off leaps in understanding and a sense of the cosmos looking back.
It also gave the catalogue its shape. The curators’ book, The Quantum Effect, published by Verlag Walther und Franz König, is monolith-shaped, and it was launched on 14 October at Frieze Masters in London. In it they set out the thinking behind the show at more length than a wall text allows.
Film and conversation
Around the exhibition sits a programme of related activities. A film series, presented with the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, picks up the show's themes and symbols, including the monolith, and looks at connections between film, perception and speculative imaginaries. There will also be public conversations on the impact of quantum theory on contemporary art and culture. Dates and speakers aren't given in the material available so far.
Why OGR
The venue matters here. OGR, the Officine Grandi Riparazioni, was built in the late nineteenth century as train repair workshops. It has been redeveloped by Fondazione CRT and has run as OGR Cult since 2017, with site-specific exhibitions, concerts and musical experimentation. Alongside it, OGR Tech, running since 2019, is one of the largest innovation hubs in Italy and Europe, supporting over 130 startups a year. A place that pairs culture with science and technology under one roof is a natural home for an exhibition that puts artists, physicists' equations and experiments side by side.
Information
The Quantum Effect
31 October 2026 – 25 February 2027
OGR Torino, Binario 1, Corso Castelfidardo 22, Turin.
