Sonia Leimer: Cosmic Dust

2 Oct 2024-12 Sep 2025

Overview

The Jencks Foundation presents COSMIC DUST, a new site-specific exhibition at The Cosmic House by Vienna-based artist Sonia Leimer, on view from 2 October 2024 to 12 September 2025.

In response to the themes of The Cosmic House and building on her previous research, Leimer’s new work explores the migratory system of ‘cosmic dust’. While space dust obscures our view into outer space when observed through the telescope, its microscopic image became an important source for scientists to study the formation of our Solar system. Each year, thousands of tons of this cosmic matter fall to Earth’s surface. These tiny particles, often magnetic and dark in colour, are also known as micrometeorites. Smaller than 0.1mm they surround us everywhere in our human environment. Over the past year, Leimer has been collecting dust from the roof of The Cosmic House and with the support of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, she analysed the collected material to uncover a fascinating array of ‘cosmic dust’.

Through microscope photography, Leimer captured these minute particles, using them as inspiration for her ‘Dust Buddies’ sculptures made of bronze, aluminum and glass. The sculptures, which Leimer places in the Architecture Library of The Cosmic House, bring into view something that is typically invisible, and which connects the human and the cosmic scales. They engage in a dialogue with the ideas imbued in Jencks’ designs for the house by seeking meaning in the cosmos, and bringing together direct references to the most recent discoveries in science with historical, spiritual or religious ideas of the universe across space and time, from Egypt to China.

In addition to the sculptures, Leimer presents a new film that records the vast scalar shifts of the project; a microscopic journey across the domestic landscape of The Cosmic House, the petri dishes in the laboratories of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, and the vast symbolic landscape created by Maggie Keswick and Charles Jencks in The Garden of Cosmic Speculation in Portrack, Scotland. The video also incorporates fragments of conversations Leimer has gathered from various sources in the archive, lectures by Charles Jencks, interviews with the researchers at the Viennese Natural History Museum, and Leimer's own thoughts, all woven together into a poetic and polyphonic sound collage.

The exhibition is produced in collaboration with Phileas – The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art with the generous support of legero united | con-tempus.eu.