The World’s Foremost Moving-Image Art Collection Lands in L.A.

Over the next five weeks, if you happen to be outside the Variety Arts Theater, a century-old architectural and cultural landmark in Downtown Los Angeles, you might glimpse Wonder Woman—the version played by Lynda Carter from 1975 to 1979—spinning into action to battle the patriarchy and Cold War villains. But this is no nostalgic clip from a ’70s television show. It’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, a 1978–79 artwork by the seminal feminist video artist Dara Birnbaum.

What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem transforms the Variety Arts Theater into an immersive survey of time-based art spanning more than a century. Presented by the Julia Stoschek Foundation in its first U.S. exhibition, the show unfolds across eight levels and brings together early cinema, video art, and contemporary moving-image works by artists including Birnbaum, Marina Abramović, Jacolby Satterwhite, Jesper Just, Anne Imhof, Mark Leckey, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Precious Okoyomon. The exhibition invites viewers to experience film and video not as linear narratives, but as atmospheric encounters shaped by history, politics, and spectacle.

Birnbaum’s feminist opening feels especially fitting given the venue’s own history. The theater opened in 1924 as a clubhouse for the Friday Morning Club, one of Los Angeles’s most influential women’s social and political organizations of the early twentieth century. The exhibition is also funded by a woman, marking German collector and patron Julia Stoschek’s Hollywood debut and the first time she has presented her vast collection of time-based art in the United States.

“I want to make art accessible, and I want to get as many visitors as possible,” Stoschek said. The exhibition is therefore free to the public—complimentary popcorn included—and open Wednesdays through Sundays from 5 PM to midnight until March 20.

While What a Wonderful World is not explicitly a feminist exhibition, it pays sustained tribute to women who shaped the medium from its earliest days. That lineage begins with French director Alice Guy-Blaché’s 1906 black and white silent film Les Résultats du féminisme (The Consequences of Feminism), one of the earliest narrative films to engage feminism. Through exaggerated role reversal, Guy-Blaché casts women as sexual aggressors, exposing how power and desire are culturally assigned. Upstairs in the main theater, Abramović’s The Hero (2001), a roughly 15-minute black and white video inspired by her father, who fought fascism in World War II, depicts the seminal performance artist seated atop a white horse, waving a white flag—the universal symbol of a ceasefire—while singing “Hej, Sloveni,” the Pan-Slavic antifascist anthem. At the theater’s mezzanine level, Ana Mendieta’s 1976 video Anima, Silueta de Cohetes unfolds as a meditation on gender, visibility, and erasure. A silhouetted body ignites and burns into nothingness, a fleeting presence that reads as a haunting prelude to Mendieta’s untimely death in 1985—an event later memorialized by mourners who recreated the outline of her body on the sidewalk using candles and flowers.

Stoschek was drawn to the moving image from a young age. “My father was very interested in photography and filming, and my grandma was an actress,” she told me at the exhibition opening. “The moving image was close to my childhood, and I think it suits my own personality.”

She tasked German curator Udo Kittelmann with editing her collection down to approximately 45 works. Watched end to end, the exhibition would take about 12 hours to experience in full.

What a Wonderful World, which is titled after the Louis Armstrong song, resonates with both art lovers and film buffs. The show activates a space that has evolved from a women’s club into a theater, a cinema, a live-music venue, and, more recently, a site for raves. Film history is threaded throughout; Walt Disney’s 1929 The Skeleton Dance flickers behind the merchandise counter in the lobby.

The works are closely aligned with the building’s past. “Charlie Chaplin was in the audience on the inauguration evening in 1924,” Stoschek said. “Clark Gable, Laurel and Hardy, and Buster Keaton performed on this stage early in their careers.”

Back on the mezzanine level, Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” plays against footage of Ku Klux Klan members marching, drawn from an anonymous YouTube edit by Sakis Han. Below, on the main theater screen, Arthur Jafa’s pulsing 2013 film, Apex, compresses found images of figures like Tupac Shakur, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Debbie Harry with graphic scenes of death and war, offering a searing meditation on African American history and visual culture.

Elsewhere, Christoph Schlingensief’s 2005 black and white film, Affenführer, stages monkeys in Nazi uniforms amid the ruins of fascist power, collapsing authoritarian imagery into grotesque farce. The work’s presence carries added resonance given Stoschek’s own family history: her great-grandfather was a member of the Nazi Party. Stoschek has publicly addressed this legacy, telling The New York Times that she aims to use her collection to support artists and communities historically underrepresented in the art world.

The exhibition also represents artists and moments that are uniquely L.A. There are Chris Burden’s 1973–77 television commercials, in which the artist purchased airtime to broadcast advertisements placing his name alongside figures like Rembrandt, Picasso, and Van Gogh, as well as another revealing the full financial disclosure of his income as an artist. Wu Tsang documents the Silver Platter, one of Los Angeles’s oldest bars serving the gay, queer, and trans Latinx community in her 2012 feature film, Wildness. Los Angeles artist Doug Aitken has his 2000 film, Blow Debris, on view on the fourth floor, which follows a group of nude people wandering in the Mojave Desert.

Those who stay until closing time are rewarded with something lighter. Each night at 11:45 p.m., footage of Miley Cyrus’s 2024 performance of “End of the World” at the Chateau Marmont plays on the main screen.

“The show moves between beauty and discomfort, tenderness and violence, because that is also where we live today,” Stoschek said. “If something stays with you afterward, I hope it’s a feeling rather than a message. Perhaps it will make you more attentive—to what you watch, how you watch, and what you allow to shape your perception of the world.”