The Haunted Theater: Inside Julia Stoschek's Time-Travel Experiment in Downtown LA

Jordan Wolfson, ARTISTS FRIENDS RACISTS, 2020, (installation view), “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem”, 2026. Photo by Joshua White, Courtesy Julia Stoschek Foundation

By JANE HOROWITZ February 27th, 2026

"This feels like a haunted house," murmured a woman stepping out of the elevator at the Variety Arts Theater. She wasn't wrong — but the ghosts here aren't wearing sheets. They're flickering on screens across six levels of a former vaudeville palace in downtown Los Angeles, where skeletons dance, monkeys wear Nazi uniforms, and the entire history of the moving image has been reassembled into something between fever dream and warning.

What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem, open through March 20, marks the Julia Stoschek Foundation's first major U.S. presentation – and it didn’t come to play it safe. The Berlin-based foundation, which manages one of the world's most significant collections of time-based art, is occupying the 102-year-old Variety Arts Theater, turning it into a sprawling meditation on what moving images have done to us, and what we've done with them.

The timing is deliberate. Los Angeles is both the birthplace of cinema and, for four days, host to Frieze Los Angeles (February 26-March 1). While collectors browse white-walled booths at the fair, Stoschek offers an alternative: a building that once housed vaudeville acts, feminist meetings, and punk shows, now reanimated as a repository for 120 years of filmmakers’ attempts to capture motion, meaning, and madness on film.

Udo Kittelmann — former director of Berlin's Nationalgalerie — assembled the show, though he says it was "edited" rather than curated. The distinction matters. This isn't a thesis-driven exhibition with wall texts explaining how each piece relates to the next. What a Wonderful World is structured more like a playlist, where Marina Abramović and Walt Disney occupy the same conceptual space, where Georges Méliès's 1902 trick films converse with contemporary motion-capture experiments, where meaning emerges from juxtaposition rather than explanation.

Kittlemann insists the exhibit is about the goodness of humanity – which may not be readily apparent to the viewer.

"It took shape as a fantasy from my imagination," Kittelmann said at the opening, standing near the lobby counter where Disney's The Skeleton Dance (1929) plays on loop. The choice is perfect: a cheerful parade of bones emerging from graves, rattling their ribs, wreaking minor havoc before returning to the earth. If that's your idea of a good time, you're in the right place.

  Lu Yang, DOKU The Flow, 2024, (installation view), “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem”, 2026. Photo by Joshua White, Courtesy Julia Stoschek Foundation.

The show begins to reveal its architecture as you move through the building. Free popcorn at the entrance signals this is meant to feel like cinema, but the rhythm is all wrong for movies. There's no beginning, middle, or end — just rooms and hallways where screens glow in the dark, where you can stay as long as you want or move on whenever the image exhausts you. 

Kittelmann placed Arthur Jafa's APEX (2013) in direct confrontation with Winsor McCay's Little Nemo (1911) in one of the theater's auditoriums. Jafa's work — a propulsive cascade of Black cultural figures from mass media, set to relentless beats — faces McCay's early animation, which features a white child's dreamworld populated by a character drawn in blackface. The pairing is intentional, uncomfortable, and impossible to ignore.

"I appreciate that Little Nemo is 100 years old," Kittelmann said. "But it's now of our time." He wasn't being abstract. The exhibition opened the same day a racist video mocking Barack and Michelle Obama appeared on Donald Trump's social media platform. "The issues haven't changed since humans are on this planet," he continued. "It's with empathy and hope that you can fight for a better world."
 

Christoph Schlingensief, Affenführer, 2005, (installation view), “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem”, 2026. Photo by Joshua White, Courtesy Julia Stoschek Foundation.

Hope, though, is in short supply in some rooms. Hitler makes a few appearances — military parades in one, and more disturbingly in Christoph Schlingensief's 2005 film Affenführer, where monkeys in Nazi uniforms roam an abandoned office at a former military site. 

Then there's Jordan Wolfson's ARTISTS FRIENDS RACISTS (2020). The artist uses holographic display technology — spinning fans embedded with micro-LEDs — to make imagery appear to levitate in space. The fans cycle through a parade of digital symbols — hearts, puppies, caged cats — while the words "Artists," "Friends," and "Racists" materialize and shatter in sequence. The only soundtrack is the whir of the machinery itself.

The exhibition is open Wednesday through Sunday, 5 p.m. to midnight — nocturnal hours that reinforce the haunted-house vibe. It's designed for lingering, for getting lost, for the kind of sustained attention that feels increasingly radical in 2026. No selfie moments. No algorithmic recommendations for what to watch next. Just you, the dark and a century or so of humans trying to make pictures move.

Jesper Just, Something to Love, 2005, (installation view), “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem”, 2026. Photo by Joshua White, Courtesy Julia Stoschek Foundation.