One of the world’s largest and finest collections of video art is headed to Los Angeles with a project promising to bridge the divide between “time-based media” and “box office gold.” Opening February 6, 2026, “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem” at the Variety Arts Theater in downtown L.A. marks the first major U.S. presentation of works from the Julia Stoschek Foundation. It expands on the city’s robust tradition of welcoming European emigres, who blur the lines between fine art and popular cinema.
Curated by Udo Kittelmann, the show pairs video work by artists including Marina Abramović, Dara Birnbaum, Cyprien Gaillard, Arthur Jafa, Jesper Just, and Lu Yang, with historic films by Luis Buñuel, Walt Disney, Alice Guy-Blaché, Winsor McCay, and Georges Méliès. Just and Birnbaum explicitly riff on Hollywood tropes regarding romance and women’s roles, while Disney’sThe Skeleton Dance (1929) offers an example of early animation.
Lu Yang’s entry offers a genderless digital avatar, a counterpoint of sorts to the inclusion of Méliès, who brought an experimental, illusionistic approach to his medium and to science fiction narratives in particular. The works altogether span 120 years of filmmaking and promise meditations on ever-advancing technologies.
Dara Birnbaum, (1978/79). Photo courtesy of Julia Stoschek Foundation.
Stoschek established her collection in 2002. In a 2017 W Magazine profile, she explained her enthusiasm for time-based media. “I try with the collection to create an image of the social and cultural changes of my generation,” she said. “We’re surrounded by all these moving images… the function is not only to generate unique images, but to seek reflection.”
Stoschek expressed admiration for post-internet artists who are creating a “totally new,” “often political” artistic language. Her collection has grown to include over 1,000 artworks by 300 artists. The foundation opened a public space in Düsseldorf in 2007 and another in Berlin in 2016. It has since staged group exhibitions on gaming, digital diaries, and alternative interpretations of zoology. It has also hosted solo shows on Mark Leckey, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and a slate of other artists hailing from around the world.
Stoschek and Kittelmann selected a venue with its own connections to politics and performance. The six-story, 1920s Venetian-style landmark in downtown Los Angeles was once home to L.A.’s first women’s clubhouse, the Friday Morning Club, which espoused feminist and creative programming. Figueroa Playhouse, a vaudeville theater, leased the space in 1924 and brought acts including Laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton to the stage. Over the years, the building hosted films, concerts, and events before falling into disrepair.
According to the press materials, “its foundations still exude an air of old glamour, and its walls reverberate with cultural memory—soon to be revived for a six-week run, reframing its legacy of social engagement and slapstick performance through contemporary moving image practices.”
(1929). Photo courtesy of Julia Stoschek Foundation
The project brings to mind the midcentury moment when European intellectuals flocked to L.A. and developed their own unusual relationships with the world of film. Composer Arnold Schoenberg lived across the street from Shirley Temple and declined work in “the industry.” Man Ray and Buñuel collaborated on a never-realized film script called . Alfred Hitchcock hired Salvador Dalí to design a dream sequence for Spellbound (1945).
The Stoschek Foundation show promises a cinematic conversation across time and place, in the black box darkness that is especially meaningful in a city famed for its relationship to the silver screen.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
