What We CarrySonia Leimer
Christian Kosmas Mayer
Museum Exhibition
Museion
Bolzano
Italy
13 Nov 2025 – 29 Mar 2026
read inGerman
Museion presents What We Carry, an exhibition that interweaves contemporary art with the core values of the Milano Cortina Cultural Olympiad 2026: inclusion, sustainability, and legacy. Featuring newly commissioned works and research by Sonia Leimer and Christian Kosmas Mayer, together with a landmark collection of 43 Olympic torches (1936–2024), the project explores how the design and symbolism of the torches intersect with questions of power, visibility, and cultural legacy. What We Carry evokes the way these values are passed from hand to hand—like the torches themselves—creating a living legacy where art meets sport. At the heart of the installation, Sonia Leimer’ expansive setting unveils a 50-meter infinity-shaped sculpture that refers to a running track and doubles as a pedestal for 42 of the Olympic torches, on loan from the association Olympic Aid and Sport Promotion Project. This dynamic sculptural display transforms the torches into a powerful reflection on continuity and change, and the evolving values of the Olympic Games. Known for her sculptural and video work, Leimer often explores how physical spaces and everyday objects reflect shifting social narratives. In this project, she brings those concerns into the exhibition space, inviting viewers to consider how we engage with objects and how their meanings evolve over time. One of the torches—the first Olympic torch from 1936—is displayed in a dedicated room within Christian Kosmas Mayer’s sculptural installation, part of his long-term research project The Life Story of Cornelius Johnson’s Olympic Oak and Other Matters of Survival. Commissioned by the Nazi-controlled German Olympic Committee for the inaugural torch relay of the modern Olympic Games, this torch is placed by Mayer in dialogue with the story of African American high jumper Cornelius Cooper Johnson. Despite winning gold in Berlin, Johnson was denied recognition: dismissed in Nazi Germany and excluded in his own country. After his return from the Games, he planted his “Olympic oak”—a tree awarded to all gold medalists—in Los Angeles, where it still stands today. Rediscovered decades later by Mayer in Koreatown, its seedlings now form part of the installation: living witnesses that carry the tree’s story across political, social, and ecological ruptures. In dialogue with the torch, the oak embodies a striking contrast: the fleeting fire of propaganda versus the enduring rootedness of lived history. Finally, the new video Solar (2025) by Sonia Leimer revisits the ceremonial origins of the Olympic tradition through a quiet study of landscape, light, and gesture. The work captures the parabolic mirror in Lausanne, which was once used to ignite the Olympic flame using the sun’s reflection and the parabolic mirror in Athens that is still in use today for this purpose. A personal narrative weaves through the film, adding a subjective layer to the overarching theme of the sun and its influence on our living environments.
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Photo
- Lineematiche - Luca Guadagnini
- Courtesy Olympic Aid and Sport Promotion Project Association
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