Laure Prouvost — Nous, frissons d’étoiles — Grand Palais – La nef — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 22 days: June 10 → July 26, 2026

Laure Prouvost describes her artistic practice as an act of translation, a sensory elaboration of emotions, perceptions, and suspended moments. Trained in experimental video, she served as an assistant to British conceptual artist John Latham during her studies. In her films and multimedia installations, Laure Prouvost develops inventive logics and associations to create complex narrative worlds. Her resolutely personal approach to storytelling is imbued with imagination, humor, wordplay, sensuality, whimsical elements, and poetic echoes. She invites us to question our usual codes and structures and to let ourselves be carried away by other spatial and temporal currents.

In the exhibition “We Felt A Star Dying”, Laure Prouvost highlights an alternative language for understanding the world: that of quantum physics. Theorized a century ago, quantum physics describes the behavior of matter and energy at the scale of atoms and particles. It challenges our Newtonian conception of phenomena and is based on probabilities rather than certainties. Thus, Laure Prouvost poses the question: “What might we feel when perceiving reality from a quantum perspective?”

The artist conducted two years of research with philosopher Tobias Rees and scientist Hartmut Neven during which she developed an interest in quantum computing and its links to the universe. With access to a powerful quantum computer, she created images and sounds that reflect the sensitive and unpredictable nature of these systems.

The multimedia installation We Felt A Star Dying combines video, sculpture, scent, sound, and light. It emerged from a transformation of the project We Felt A Star Dying, presented in 2025 at Kraftwerk Berlin, commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and co-commissioned by OGR Torino. Displayed in bright conditions, it appears as an inverted image of the original installation conceived for the dark, industrial architecture of the Berlin venue. Upon entering the exhibition at the Grand Palais, the tunnel that visitors must pass through marks the transition from the nocturnal realm to the diurnal realm. A recurring motif in the artist’s work, this tunnel offers an initiatory path toward the artwork, preparing visitors for their encounter with it and the dazzling experience it offers.

It opens onto a fluid environment inhabited by The Beginning, a monumental kinetic sculpture with six limbs. Animated by sound and light, it is at once omnipresent and evanescent, imposing and fragile, cosmic and earthly. The sense of disorientation continues as we discover at its center a video titled We Felt A Star Dying, which connects us to matter in all its forms (living/non-living, natural/mechanical), from the infinitely small to the infinitely large. It reveals an interconnected reality governed by quantum principles. Around them, fantastical meteorite-like elements — the Cute Bits, a pun on qubits, the unit of measurement in quantum computing — dance in pairs the ballet of entanglement, suspended from the glass roof of the nave. The quantum phenomenon of entanglement refers to the correlation between the states of two particles: when the state of one changes, the other’s changes instantaneously, regardless of the distance between them.

Some Cute Bits take the form of helmets, inside which one can hear their voices and smell their metallic, mineral scent. Multiple sensory stimuli thus foster immersion: the spatialization of sound; the filaments of The Beginning that brush against visitors as they pass; the dazzling spotlights; the enveloping cushion on which one lies down to watch the video; or the ; or the reliefs formed by the platforms and other sandbanks.