Marina Abramović, The Hero 25FPS, 2001. Courtesy the Julia Stoschek Foundation

In a long-dormant Venetian-style landmark originally opened in 1924—which once hosted vaudeville and live theater—the nonprofit Julia Stoschek Foundation is reviving a Los Angeles legacy. The Variety Arts Theater, a century after its opening, will showcase films and videos by Marina Abramović, Doug AItken, Dara Birnbaum, Thomas Demand, Anne Imhof, Arthur Jafa, Mark Leckey, Ana Mendieta and Wolfgang Tillmans, among many others.

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Most pieces are plucked from German socialite Julia Stoschek’s art collection, which spans 900 works from the second half of the 20th century onwards, encompassing video, film, single- and multi-channel moving-image installation, multimedia environments and virtual reality. At the theater, a sampling of these will be mixed in with early works, such as those by Méliès and Buñuel. Unfolding across six floors, “What A Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem,” on view through March 20, 2026, has been “edited”—his word—by Udo Kittelmann (formerly director of the Nationalgalerie, State Museums of Berlin) into a cinematic panorama. Splicing silent cinema and contemporary moving image into a cross-disciplinary dialogue (some with specific pairings across decades), it yields a complex vision of humanity across 120 years.

Observer spoke to Kittelmann about willfully modifying art world terminology, being firmly anti-black box and the unmistakable constancy of human desires.

How will the L.A.-based Julia Stoschek Foundation connect to the German iterations in Berlin and Düsseldorf? Is this a completely new project or more of a sister site?

Well, it’s connected to Berlin and Düsseldorf just based on Julia Stoschek’s collection about time-based media art. That’s it. The project—which I do not consider anymore as an exhibition—is conceived and was always deeply thought about to be totally independent. It’s made especially for L.A.

Why do you not consider it an exhibition?

It goes with the subtitle of the project: “What a Wonderful World,” subtitled “An Audiovisual Poem.” I consider it as a work of poetry.

When a poem is not on a page, but over six floors in a heritage space, what does that mean, exactly?

So it’s a quite long poem, if you want. I consider each work as one line in a poem. And I took this view mainly for two reasons. One reason is that expectations might differ from the term of “an exhibition.” If you name it a poem, it goes with different expectations. I hope so. Exhibitions have so many formats. But poems… to put a poem on a stage, it’s a more experimental format. It shouldn’t be too static, the whole thing.

How would expectations change by reframing it as a poem?

An exhibition… you can consume it. You easily can walk through an exhibition. And a poem, hopefully—or in my understanding—always needs more concentration to get it, finally, as a whole. It leads more to a general idea. Please watch, listen, think about the whole as one work. In the last few weeks, it came into my mind that it’s a kind of a gesamtkunstwerk, especially within this amazing building. It’s a totally different staging than usually you would find within an exhibition conceived for........

© Observer