February 6–March 20, 2026
Los Angeles California 90015
United States
The Julia Stoschek Foundation, which manages one of the world’s foremost collections of time-based art, announces its first major presentation of work in the US: What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem, a sweeping odyssey into the depths of human experience unfolding through film and video.
Edited by Udo Kittelmann, What a Wonderful World (February 6–March 20, 2026) will transform the iconic Venetian-style Variety Arts Theater in downtown Los Angeles into a soul-stirring experience, a cinematic journey through the trajectories, secrets and fragilities of humanity.
Bringing silent cinema and time-based art together for the first time in a city defined by film, this experimental presentation initiates a rare cross-disciplinary dialogue, dismantling hierarchies between art forms and dissolving the boundaries between visual art and cinema, museum and theater, white cube and black box. In doing so, it traces the evolution of visual storytelling over the past century, revealing how our ways of seeing and of being seen, continue to shift, refract, and renew.
Unfolding across six floors, What a Wonderful World presents groundbreaking works by artists such as Marina Abramović, Cyprien Gaillard, Arthur Jafa, or Lu Yang, alongside cinematic milestones by Luis Buñuel, Walt Disney, Alice Guy-Blaché, Winsor McCay, and Georges Méliès. Together, these works form a panoramic and layered portrait of humanity across 120 years; altogether ironic, sincere, critical and compassionate.
Featured Artists: Marina Abramović, Doug Aitken, Kader Attia, Dara Birnbaum, Monica Bonvicini, Robert Boyd, Chris Burden, Paul Chan, Thomas Demand, Maya Deren, Cyprien Gaillard, Douglas Gordon, Anne Imhof, Arthur Jafa, Ulysses Jenkins, Jesper Just, Sigalit Landau, Mark Leckey, Klara Lidén, Paul McCarthy, Alex McQuilkin, Ana Mendieta, Precious Okoyomon, Jon Rafman, Bunny Rogers, Jacolby Satterwhite, Christoph Schlingensief, Jeremy Shaw, P. Staff, Sturtevant, Wolfgang Tillmans, Wu Tsang, Ant Farm & T.R. Uthco, Jordan Wolfson, Lu Yang.
About the Variety Arts Theater
What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem takes place across all six floors of The Variety Arts Theater in downtown Los Angeles, an abandoned Venetian Renaissance–style landmark deeply rooted in the city’s cultural history. Originally opened in 1924 as the Friday Morning Club, the building served as a social and cultural hub for women’s organizations before becoming a premier venue for vaudeville, live theater, and film. During Hollywood’s golden age, its stage and lounges were frequented by stars such as Clark Gable, Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, Buster Keaton and Fred Astaire, who passed through its gilded halls for rehearsals, premieres, and soirées. Over the decades, the theater hosted countless performances, later transitioning through phases as a private club, music hall, and filming location. Today, it stands as a historic yet largely dormant landmark—an echo chamber of L.A.’s layered entertainment history.
About Udo Kittelmann
What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem is rooted in Udo Kittelmann’s curatorial approach—internationally recognized for its conceptual rigor, critical engagement with contemporary issues, and an operatic sense of staging balanced by poetic restraint. Former long-term Director of the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt am Main and the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Kittelmann has also conceived major interdisciplinary exhibitions for Fondazione Prada in Milan, Venice, and Shanghai as well as at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland and at Centro Botín in Santander, Spain. Reflecting his practice, this collaboration with the Julia Stoschek Foundation creates an emotional encounter that positions visitors as active participants in a spatial, temporal, and sensory journey.
About the Julia Stoschek Foundation
The Julia Stoschek Foundation is a nonprofit arts and culture organization dedicated to the public presentation, advancement, conservation, and scholarship of time-based art. Across two publicly accessible exhibition spaces in Berlin and Düsseldorf, the Julia Stoschek Foundation presents pioneering media and performance art in large-scale exhibitions and discursive events. The foundation also manages the Julia Stoschek Collection (est. 2002), one of the world’s most comprehensive private collections of time-based art. With over 1,000 artworks by 300 artists from the 1960s to today, the collection spans video, film, single- and multi-channel moving-image installation, multimedia environments, performance, sound, and virtual reality.
