Julia Stoschek opened her collection of time-based media art to the public ten years ago, and to celebrate the anniversary she has invited the British artist Ed Atkins to curate an exhibition from her holdings. Generation Loss: 10 Years of the Julia Stoschek Collection (until 10 July 2018) opened this week at Stoschek’s Düsseldorf gallery.
The Stoschek collection includes work from the 1960s to the present day, covering a period when time-based art has changed drastically. “I think today, just thinking about Documenta or the Venice Biennale, there is no important group show [or] biennial where video art is not shown in a completely different and improved way than it used to be,” Stoschek tells The Art Newspaper.
“I remember ten years ago when you would see a group show or biennial you would see some time-based media art pieces on show but very few,” Stoschek says. “Most of them were very badly installed, behind curtains in small black boxes.”
Under Atkins’s vision the new exhibition displays the works on screens of increasing size, placed side by side and divided by soundproof glass. Visitors can therefore see many of the works at once, as with an exhibition of painting or sculpture, but with no overlap of sound. The exhibition includes several important time-based media works by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Lucy Raven, Joan Jonas, Cheryl Donegan, Jordan Wolfson, Lynda Benglis and Charles Atlas.
“I collected all these artworks but now I see them in a totally new frame, in a totally new installation and I am walking through my own collection and finding out totally new things and that is so exciting and that I feel is a gift,” Stoschek said.
Generation Loss takes its title from the successive loss of quality that takes place when digital data is copied. In the decade since it opened to the public, the Julia Stoschek Collection has staged 15 exhibitions including solo shows of Cyprien Gaillard, Wu Tsang, Hito Steyerl and Derek Jarman. The organisation also opened a space in Berlin, which was originally intended to be temporary but now looks to be a permanent fixture.