THE QUANTUM EFFECT
Jacqui Davies, Time Forks Perpetually Towards Innumerable Futures. In One Of Them I Am Your Enemy (2025), film still
Curated by
Daniel Birnbaum
& Jacqui Davies
5 September – 23 November 2025
SMAC San Marco Art Centre, the pioneering new arts institution in Piazza San Marco, Venice, announces The Quantum Effect, an exhibition co-curated by Daniel Birnbaum and Jacqui Davies, and produced by SMAC and OGR Torino.
The Quantum Effect explores spatial and temporal paradoxes introduced by quantum theory: parallel universes, time travel, teleportation, supersymmetry and dark matter. The exhibition will include 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 1,000m² of exhibition space. The curation draws conceptually on Raymond Roussel’s seminal 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.
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Jeff Koons, One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985), Copyright Jeff Koons
Mark Leckey, To the Old World (Thank You for the Use of Your Body) (2021-22),
Courtesy the Artist and Cabinet, London
SMAC’s exhibition space is comprised of 16 galleries, arranged along a continuous corridor that stretches for over 80m. The Quantum Effect will centre 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 will in effect become 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.”
Dara Birnbaum, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-79)
Courtesy of Dara Birnbaum and LUX, London
