Berlin-based collector Julia Stoschek is widely known in the art world not only for assembling one of the world’s first and largest private collections dedicated to video art, film, performance documentation and digital practices but also for championing these mediums well before they became central to artistic and public debate. With more than 900 artworks by 300 artists from the 1960s to the present, Stoschek’s collection spans video, film, single- and multi-channel moving-image installations, multimedia environments, performance, sound and virtual reality, with some supplementary photography, sculpture and painting.
Weeks ahead of Frieze L.A., her collection arrived in the U.S. in an expansive exhibition at the Variety Arts Theater in downtown Los Angeles, one of the city’s most iconic venues tied to movie and entertainment history. On view through March 20, “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem,” edited by curator Udo Kittelmann, is a sweeping, immersive audiovisual odyssey staged across the six-story Venetian-style landmark with works by some of the most groundbreaking contemporary artists working with video, including Marina Abramović, Cyprien Gaillard, Arthur Jafa and Lu Yang, alongside milestone moments from the history of cinema by Luis Buñuel, Walt Disney, Alice Guy-Blaché, Winsor McCay and Georges Méliès. The result is an unsettling, soul-stirring cinematic journey tracing how the fluidity, narrative openness and imaginative expansiveness inherent to moving images have accompanied, reflected and challenged different trajectories of human evolution, while empowering the imagination to envision and question its future.
On the occasion of the first major presentation of her foundation’s work in the U.S., Observer caught up with Julia Stoschek to learn more about her collecting journey into the realm of time-based art and how her passion and vision take shape in this exhibition, conceived in close collaboration with Kittelmann.
When asked whether she can trace the origins of her passion for video, Stoschek recalls growing up watching MTV, like many from the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s. “I was a classic MTV kid in the ’80s. I loved music videos, and I still do. I love movement. I love images. I love the moving image,” she says. Her grandmother was an actress, and her father was deeply involved in photography and filming. “A lot of important moments from my childhood were captured on video, so I was surrounded by photography and video growing up. It feels very natural to me. I recognized quite early on that this was a medium I was deeply fascinated by. That’s why I started focusing on time-based media art.”
Stoschek can also point to a precise moment—and a specific work—that profoundly shaped her collecting journey. In 2003, she saw an exhibition by Douglas Gordon at Gagosian and was deeply struck by Play Dead; Real Time, a groundbreaking three-channel video following a four-year-old circus elephant performing a series of gestures, including standing still, begging and playing dead. Filmed inside a gallery, the work involved bringing a live elephant into the space and recording it with multiple cameras as it slowly lay down and enacted its own “death.” The installation pairs two large-scale projections showing the elephant at life size with a smaller monitor placed on the floor, zooming in on the animal’s eye. The simultaneous screens create a tension between monumentality and intimacy, spectacle and vulnerability. “It’s very powerful. There’s also a wonderful background story,” Stoschek says, recalling how she was struck by the work’s scale and by the confrontation imposed by the life-size presence of the elephant. “I was completely fascinated. I spent hours and hours in the gallery.”
While Play Dead; Real Time is not part of her collection, Stoschek later acquired other works by Gordon, including Making of Monster from 1996, which is in the L.A. exhibition. In the video, Gordon films himself in a bathroom mirror, drawing stripes across his face. To heighten its resonance, the work is installed inside one of the building’s bathrooms. “I love that installation and how it works within the Variety Arts Theater,” Stoschek says with genuine excitement.
The first work Stoschek ever acquired was by Aaron Young in 2004. At the time, she was a board member at MoMA PS1 and met Young in the cafeteria. “He opened his laptop and showed me a work titled High Performance,” she recalls, describing a video in which a motorcycle and rider perform a 360-degree rubber burn on the street. “The work combines everything: it’s like a painting, with the rubber marks on the ground, but it’s also a performance and a video. I was fascinated and asked him if it was possible to acquire the work.” At the time, Young did not yet have a gallery and had little sense of how to sell the piece or at what price. “We ended up discussing a very low price together. It was so funny. But it was never so romantic again, I can tell you.”
As this first acquisition already suggests, collecting time-based art comes with a unique set of complexities—challenges that Stoschek has since played a central role in confronting and helping to resolve by building an entire infrastructure around these practices. Through the creation of her foundation, she has encouraged research, academization and the development of best practices for display and conservation. Since the official founding of the Julia Stoschek Collection in 2007, its spaces—first in Düsseldorf and later, from 2016, in Berlin—have been exhibition venues designed specifically to meet the technical, spatial and temporal demands of moving-image work.
Collecting media art comes with its own set of challenges—not only in preservation but also in circulation and in defining what precisely constitutes the artwork. In its early days, the art system itself struggled not only with questions of value but also with the material status of the work: is it the file, the screen, the device? Many of these works are time-based, meaning the conditions in which they are experienced can never be fully replicated. Yet these challenges never discouraged Stoschek, who is driven by the conviction that durational and media works constitute the most accurate artistic language for understanding contemporary life, precisely because they raise questions that feel even more urgent today amid the accelerating immaterialization of culture and the growing mediation of everyday experience through digital devices.
From the outset, Stoschek took the challenge of preservation particularly seriously, aware that the technologies on which these works depend are constantly evolving. “We have so many different formats—hardware and software—and everything is constantly changing,” she notes, recalling how Daniel Birnbaum once described collecting media-based art as being like collecting snowballs. “It’s an ephemeral medium, I know. And yes, we take care of it, but it’s a lot of work, and it’s constantly changing. You need to adapt to new technologies every time. That’s simply part of it.” Today, the foundation maintains a dedicated archive for historical works on 35mm film and VHS, and the entire collection has been digitized, an immense but necessary effort to ensure these works remain accessible in the future.
In recent years, digital and media-based works have begun to enter museum collections more visibly, particularly in the U.S. Conversations around digital art, at fairs and exhibitions alike, are becoming increasingly common. At a certain point, Stoschek suggests, it may no longer make sense to maintain rigid distinctions between categories. “Time-based media is now established. It’s present in major group exhibitions and even at fairs like Art Basel. It’s a medium people can experience directly,” she says, acknowledging the role her foundation has played in supporting this shift.
Looking ahead, however, she’d like to see a deeper level of institutional commitment. “Some institutions have begun collecting media-based art, but the knowledge around presentation still needs to grow,” she says. Producing and staging such a major exhibition in Los Angeles presented a significant challenge, yet it also carried the potential to establish new benchmarks for best practices in exhibiting this type of art.
How “What a Wonderful World” came together
“Every exhibition is a challenge, but when you create a project like this—entirely based on media art and across the distance between Berlin, Düsseldorf and Los Angeles—you are transforming something originally conceived far away and reactivating it in a new context,” Kittelmann adds. “We wanted a space where the artworks would receive the attention they truly need. There are around 45 artists, with approximately 45 media and time-based works—video, installation and more. This requires an enormous amount of space.”
Finding the right venue took years, but once the Variety Arts Theater emerged as a possibility, there was no hesitation. Its history alone made it compelling: legendary figures such as Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton and Clark Gable performed there early in their careers on the main stage, Stoschek says. “Charlie Chaplin was in the audience when the Variety Arts Theater opened. Bringing this show into such an extraordinary building, in combination with silent films, historical and classic cinema, together with contemporary video works from my collection—I couldn’t imagine a better situation or a better place for this audiovisual poem. I’m so happy to be able to do the show here, in this building, with this history.”
They were determined not to rely on the typical black-box format, which can easily become monotonous, especially when visitors encounter more than three or four works. At the core was the broader question of how to sustain an audience’s attention, particularly in an era of hyperstimulation and visual saturation. For Kittelmann, it ultimately comes down to content and structure, which he compares to reading a 500-page book: it depends on how the narrative is constructed and, of course, on the story itself. “If you manage to get people’s attention, and if they don’t lose their intention, then they will take on the challenge themselves—to see and to understand, to watch and to listen.”
Certain physical and structural conditions can help create this suspension of time and space, allowing audiences to fully immerse themselves in each work. Darkness is one of these conditions, as cinema has long demonstrated. “The moment you ask people to come in darkness, the audience immediately enters a different mood and is asked to make a conscious decision to step into a space of contemplation,” Kittelmann observes. The audience, he adds, must understand that this is not a typical exhibition visit, but something closer to attending a screening, an experience that requires a different kind of planning. For this reason, entry is organized through designated viewing times. Yet there is no prescribed duration for the visit, nor a fixed exhibition path. “It’s a journey, and it’s completely up to them. They can judge what they think, what they prefer and even what they don’t like.”
From a curatorial perspective, the goal was to create something that would remain in people’s memories, not something one enters, exits and immediately forgets. “The challenge was to select artworks that would genuinely make people reflect on what the world is about. That is, for me, the true power of art at its best,” Kittelmann reflects. “I feel incredibly privileged that so many works in Julia’s collection have exactly this quality: through their content and the issues they address, they stay with you.”
That intention informed the exhibition’s title, “What a Wonderful World,” which refers to Louis Armstrong’s famous song, written in the 1960s at a moment when the state of the world was, in some ways, not so different from today, as both Kittelmann and Stoschek observe. There were struggles for human rights, wars and political tensions, many of which resonate today. Yet Armstrong’s song was meant to offer hope. “It’s a sad song, yes, but it’s also a melancholic one. And that’s very much what the whole exhibition is about. It’s about hope, but also about acknowledging that life is a combination of magic and tragedy,” Kittelmann explains. Fittingly, the very first work visitors encounter is Walt Disney’s Skeleton Dance. “It makes it very clear that we’re entering a space where even life after death can be playful—that maybe the skeletons are having a much better party than they did when they were alive.”
Ultimately, the exhibition reflects on how the technologies of cinema, video and other emerging time-based tools have expanded the human capacity for storytelling and imagination, often serving as a means of envisioning alternatives or resisting the pressures of the present moment. This, Stoschek acknowledges, is one of the privileges of moving images. Their fluidity enables an ongoing exercise in world-building, from which all these works of art emerge. “Technology increasingly shapes how we communicate and how we live,” she concludes. “Media-based art is connected to that reality. It is the artistic language of our time. It doesn’t just reflect the world—it can help us understand it and even shape the future.”
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