The Julia Stoschek Foundation will stage its first major US presentation next year with “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem,” a large-scale exhibition of time-based artworks set to open February 6 at the historic Variety Arts Theater in downtown Los Angeles. The show, organized by curator Udo Kittelmann, brings together contemporary video works from the foundation’s holdings and early cinema classics, creating what organizers describe as an encounter spanning 120 years of moving-image history.
Founded in Berlin and Düsseldorf, the Julia Stoschek Foundation oversees one of the world’s most expansive private collections of time-based art, with more than 1,000 works by 300 artists. Its programming—focused on film, video, performance, sound, and multimedia environments—positions the foundation as a major force in the field. Stoschek, an ARTnews Top 200 Collector, is particularly known for championing moving-image work and for making parts of her collection publicly accessible online.
The Los Angeles exhibition will bring together an extensive roster of artists, including Marina Abramović, Arthur Jafa, Cyprien Gaillard, Lu Yang, Maya Deren, Doug Aitken, and Monica Bonvicini, alongside early film pioneers such as Luis Buñuel, Alice Guy-Blaché, Winsor McCay, Georges Méliès, and Walt Disney. The project expands the foundation’s longstanding interest in situating contemporary video practice within a broader cinematic lineage.
The venue—a six-story Venetian-style landmark originally built for the Friday Morning Club in 1911—has hosted everything from suffragist meetings to vaudeville acts and punk concerts. After two decades of disuse, the building will reopen for the six-week run, framing the exhibition within a site long associated with cultural experimentation and public gathering.
Kittelmann, the former director of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, is known for interdisciplinary exhibitions that merge historical and contemporary material. His past projects include major shows for Hilma af Klint, Douglas Gordon, Sturtevant, and Tomás Saraceno. The German Pavilion that he organized for the 2001 Venice Biennale, by artist Gregor Schneider, received the Golden Lion.
The announcement comes as interest in time-based art continues to grow. Canyon, a 40,000-square-foot venue dedicated to video, sound, and performance art, is set to open on New York’s Lower East Side in 2026, with early programming linked to the “Worldbuilding” exhibition first staged at the Julia Stoschek Collection in 2022.
