Curated by Udo Kittelmann, the Julia Stoschek Foundation’s exhibition “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem” transforms the dilapidated Variety Arts Theater in Downtown Los Angeles into a hauntological site of media exploration. By placing contemporary video works from the Stoschek Collection alongside historical silent films within a 1920s Renaissance-style building, the exhibition leverages the site’s architectural decay to evoke a sense of absence and spectral presence. The venue, which once hosted figures ranging from Charlie Chaplin to Hüsker Dü, serves as a poignant backdrop that blurs the lines between the past and the contemporary moment.
Tim Griffin’s review posits that the exhibition transcends a mere archaeological survey of video art, instead reflecting the current schism between physical collective spaces and siloed digital viewership. The 'missing crowds' of the theater are replaced by screens, suggesting that the abandoned theater is no longer a site of shared experience but a mirror for our own isolated, media-saturated existence. Ultimately, the show suggests that the 'past' encountered in these cavernous rooms is actually a reflection of our own spectral present, highlighting the precarity of modern cultural institutions.