TURIN.- OGR Torino presents We Felt a Star Dying, a new immersive installation by artist Laure Prouvost that explores the paradoxical logic of quantum physics and its derivative technologies.

Co-commissioned by OGR Torino and LAS Art Foundation, and first presented by the German institution in the industrial spaces of Kraftwerk, Berlin, the work questions what it means to perceive reality from a quantum perspective, marking a new stage in the artist’s practice. In her films and multimedia installations, Laure Prouvost constructs imaginary worlds where logic bends, narratives multiply and intersect, and fragments of poetry slip into unexpected details. With humor, wordplay and fantastical elements, she invites the public to unlearn the codes of everyday life and open themselves to new ways of thinking and engaging with the world – an invitation to let go and embrace an unconventional approach to experiences.

A century ago, quantum physics broke away from the determinism of classical mechanics, revealing a world in which particles can exist in multiple states at once, entangle across distances and cross barriers once thought insurmountable. WE FELT A STAR DYING stems from Laure Prouvost’s access to a quantum computer and is the outcome of two years of research and development.

Together with philosopher Tobias Rees and scientist Hartmut Neven, Prouvost explores what it means to build machines from a quantum perspective and experiments with an artificial-intelligence model specifically developed for the project, based on data manipulated by quantum phenomena. In contrast to the rigidity of classical physics, quantum computers embrace unpredictability, challenging the very notion of the machine. Their instability – usually regarded as a limitation – becomes, in the artist’s hands, fertile ground for imagination.

The work takes the form of a multisensory, immersive environment that includes video and sounds generated by a quantum computer, alongside sculptural and olfactory elements. Images dissolve into pure noise and re-emerge in imperfect form, offering glimpses of a reality that eludes all prediction. These transitions propagate through sound, light and movement, immersing the viewer in the instability, entanglement and infinite generativity that characterise quantum systems.

Even ambient noise comes into play: cosmic rays, heat and magnetic fields influence the installation just as they interfere with real quantum machines. The result is an environment that oscillates between synchronicity and disintegration – an echo of a universe in perpetual transformation – revealing how these machines are intimately connected and interdependent with the cosmos.

As the exhibition title suggests, the concept of noise lies at the heart of the collaboration among Prouvost, Rees and Neven: even the explosion of a dying star, millions of light years away, can be perceived and interfere with the functioning of a quantum computer.

Installed at OGR – a cathedral of the industrial age – the project juxtaposes the heaviness of past machinery with the sophistication of contemporary quantum technologies. Within this monumental shell, Prouvost imagines the dawn of a new era. At the heart of Binario 1, The Beginning – a kinetic sculpture with five arms, tentacles or petals, fragile and unpredictable – is in motion. Unlike the machines that once inhabited the former Officine Grandi Riparazioni, it vibrates with its own sensitivity: its thermal core detects variations in heat, translating them into visible changes. Its limbs move in intermittent synchronies, embodying the dance of quantum systems.

The Cute Bits hanging sculptures move to generate prisms of light. Playing on the name of qubits – the units of quantum information – they embody the principle of entanglement: moving in mirrored rhythms, connected even when they appear distant. They evoke at once cosmic dust and fragments of machines, stitching together earth and stars, organic and mineral matter. Visitors can approach and immerse their heads inside, breathing in metallic scents as voices whisper the poetic lexicon of the quantum.

The journey culminates in the video We Felt a Star Dying, projected overhead, which highlights how quantum logic underpins all matter – human and non- human, living and non-living, natural and artificial. The video intertwines experimental footage – captured through microscopes, drones and thermal cameras – with images processed by a quantum computer, which dissolve and recompose under the effect of noise. The sound score by KUKII blends devotional chants from around the world with choral passages written by Prouvost and Paul Buck, composing a sonic ritual for the quantum age.

According to philosopher Tobias Rees, quantum processes free us from modern dualisms – natural/technical, human/machine, living/non-living. Prouvost embraces this liberation, making it tangible and transforming quantum mechanics from an abstract theory into a shared sensory experience.

Laure Prouvost is a particle of a larger body of particles living and working in the Northern Eurosphere. After receiving a BFA from Central Saint Martins, studying towards an MFA at Goldsmiths and taking part in the LUX Associate Programme in London, Prouvost found a superposition next to the wet space of a dirty canal, helpful to float around the globe to perform images, sounds, installations, tea bags, wet floors and tentacles. Spending most of the time entangled with surrounding cosmic and non cosmic bits, humans and bodies, brains and feelings, makers, rubbish, flowers and chickens, they won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and were the recipient of the Turner Prize. Some former presentations include a deep see blue surrounding you at the 58th Biennale di Venezia; an oma-je at Kunsthalle Vienna, PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art in Montreal and Remai Modern in Saskatoon; a flying grandma with birds at Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo and De Pont Museum in Tilburg; Esmé at Busan Biennale, Kiasma in Helsinki and La Casa Encendida in Madrid; a smoking mother at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk; a melting into another at Kunsthalle Lissabon and Sonsbeek Arnhem; a tunnel for a trespassing fountain at Palais de Tokyo in Paris; a waiting room with objects at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; and a new museum for grand dad at Hangar Bicocca in Milan.