Have you ever tried to wrap your head around quantum physics? I recently found myself in a dimly lit former power station in East Berlin desperately trying to understand the behavioural patterns of subatomic particles. Above me, illuminated blobs strung with glittering streamers rose and fell, as an eerie soundtrack of pre-recorded shrieks, sighs and gasps echoed around the cavernous concrete hall.
With her new show, the Turner Prize-winning French artist Laure Prouvost is attempting to bring to life the core principles of quantum physics, marking a century since they were defined by Niels Bohr and Max Planck. Thankfully, Prouvost has distilled their mind-boggling concepts down into a single mantra; we are everything and everything is us.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is a vast, octopus-like tent with silken tentacles that stretch out across the space. At its heart is a large screen suspended from the ceiling, beneath which spectators gather to lie on their backs in a circle. On display is a video that invites viewers to reflect on the depth of our physical entanglement with the world – a hallucinogenic collage of clips showing sweeping shots of a wintry forest, close-ups of microscopic shrimp, flamingoes, comets blazing through a purple sky.
“We are the air,” says Prouvost’s voiceover. “We are the blood inside the cat’s brain. We are the big fat whale that swallowed us.”
The installation was commissioned by Berlin-based LAS Art Foundation, a non-profit organisation connecting creatives with the worlds of science and technology. Since launching in 2019, its projects have included everything from the creation of an immersive, virtual swamp in collaboration with the Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen to partnering with Israeli choreographers Eyal & Behar on a new dance piece.
“We wanted to work with Laure because she’s very playful and sensitive,” says LAS co-founder Bettina Kames. “She talks to your heart as well as engaging your mind.” For Kames, it was important that the show appeal to those who might otherwise be unfamiliar with the world of quantum theories. “It’s all about experiencing things. You can come in here without knowing anything about quantum computing. You can just get immersed first, with all your senses. Then you can really dive into it deeper.”
Prouvost’s fascination with quantum theory stretches back decades. “I used to assist the artist John Latham in London for several years in my 20s,” she says. “He introduced me to quantum and we would talk about it a lot.”
“We are everywhere. That’s what I wanted to capture in the video,” she says. “I wanted people’s brains to switch to the current moment, to feel themselves stretching out of the building before they become little quantum bits floating in the sky above.”
Prouvost’s profile was given a huge boost in 2013 when she won the Turner Prize with Wantee, a video work blending fiction and reality to imagine her grandfather’s mysterious disappearance. Today she works from her studio in her adopted hometown of Brussels.
To realise We Felt a Star Dying, Prouvost and Kames travelled to Google’s Quantum AI Lab in Santa Barbara, where she was given rare access to a quantum computer – a device that uses the counter-intuitive properties of quantum physics to perform operations impossible for a classical computer.
Prouvost used the computer to generate new sequencing for her video work, as well as feeding in audio from her sonic collaborator Kukii, a Cairo-based musician, who used the results to produce the installation’s audio.
“A lot of the vocabulary around quantum is so close to an Ayahuasca or acid trip,” she says. “It all comes back to the same conclusion; the time and space that we experience can actually be exploded. There’s many versions of us happening at the same time.”
These hypnotic thoughts linger long after leaving the dark halls of the power station. Reality feels a little less solid – perhaps because, as Prouvost suggests, it isn’t. In the quantum realm, we are everywhere, everything, and always in motion.
We Felt a Star Dying is at Kraftwerk Berlin until May 4
Hester Underhill is a freelance journalist living in Athens
