‘What a Wonderful World’ Reawakens Los Angeles’ Cinematic Gem

Summary

• The Julia Stoscheck Foundation reopens Los Angeles’ storied Variety Arts Theater for What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem, its first major U.S. presentation
• The exhibition features 35 artists, ranging from cinema pioneers to today’s contemporary artists, including Jon Rafman, Precious Okoyomon, Doug Aitken, Arthur Jafa, Walt Disney and more

Variety Arts Theater, the five-story ex-cinema palace in downtown Los Angeles, has kept its doors shut for decades. Now, the landmark is making a major public comeback, courtesy of the Julia Stoschek Foundation, to stage one of the most ambitious presentations of its kind.

Titled What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem, the exhibition unfolds as a cross-century encounter of video storytelling. It takes on the form of an art house cinematheque, pairing recent time-based pieces by contemporary art greats with masterworks by cinema’s earliest makers. Ironic and sincere, critical and compassionate, the show’s subtitle is no metaphor; like a poem, each each work makes up a single line, curator Udo Kittelmann described, accumulating and bending meaning through attention and time.

Expanding its footprint in Berlin and Düsseldorf, the presentation marks the foundation’s first major U.S. moment, plucking pieces from impressive collection of new media collector and German socialite, Julia Stoschek — an over 1,000-piece, 300-artist trove that stands as one of the most comprehensive bodies of media art.

The inaugural LA showcase includes the likes of Precious Okoyomon, Arthur Jafa, Anne Imhof, Ana Mendieta, Mark Leckey, Jon Rafman, Lu Yang and Wolfgang Tillmans, appearing alongside film pioneers like Alice Guy-Blanché, Georges Méliès, Winsor McCay, Luis Buñuel and Walt Disney.

Through six floors, visitors drift through a century of moving image, flickering between wonder, unease, humor and melancholy — a “soul-stirring experience,” per the press statement, that “[confronts] the secrets and fragilities of humanity while holding up a mirror to the state of the world today.” 

What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem is now on view through March 20. Read on for the full list of exhibited artists.

Variety Arts Theater
940 S Figueroa St,
Los Angeles, CA 90015

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