Reality is usually sold to us as something solid. A room is a room. A body is a body. A star is far away. A particle is too small to matter. Laure Prouvost has never been especially interested in that kind of certainty.
With Nous, frissons d’étoiles, presented beneath the vast glass roof of the Grand Palais in Paris, the artist turns quantum physics into something less like a theory and more like a sensory disturbance. Running from June 10 to July 26, 2026, the monumental installation combines video, sculpture, sound, scent, and light, asking what it might feel like to experience the world from a quantum point of view.
The project comes out of two years of research with philosopher Tobias Rees and scientist Hartmut Neven, during which Prouvost had access to a powerful quantum computer. But the exhibition is not trying to explain quantum computing in a clean educational way. Instead, it translates its instability into atmosphere: probability, relation, sensitivity, entanglement, and the collapse of ordinary certainty.
Visitors enter through a tunnel before arriving inside a dazzling environment inhabited by The Beginning, a monumental kinetic sculpture made of six limbs and animated by sound and light. At its centre is the video We Felt A Star Dying, which connects matter in all its forms: living and non-living, natural and mechanical, microscopic and cosmic. Around it, suspended meteorite-like objects called Cute Bits play on the idea of qubits, the basic units of quantum computing.
That pun is very Prouvost. Her work has always moved through language as if words were slippery objects: mistranslated, misheard, broken open, made sensual. Here, even physics becomes unstable poetry. The exhibition does not ask the viewer to master the science. It asks them to surrender to a world where perception is no longer obedient.
What makes the Grand Palais setting so charged is the contrast between the building’s monumental transparency and the work’s refusal of fixed meaning. Under the glass roof, everything feels exposed and unreal at once. Light comes in from above, while Prouvost’s installation pulls the visitor into a space where matter seems to flicker between states.
In that sense, Nous, frissons d’étoiles is not really about quantum physics as a subject. It is about the emotional shock of realising that the world may be stranger, more relational, and less stable than our daily habits allow us to feel.
Prouvost turns the Grand Palais into a place where science becomes sensation, where particles become mythology, and where the viewer is invited to stop understanding reality for a moment and simply tremble inside it.