Julia Stoschek Foundation

Julia Stoschek Foundation is among the world's most comprehensive private collections dedicated to time-based art, presenting works from the 1960s to the present across film, video, performance and expanded media. The foundation opened its first exhibition space to the public in Dusseldorf in 2007, housed in a former industrial building of more than 3,000 square metres, adapted by Berlin architects Kuehn Malvezzi into a dedicated venue for media art. A second space followed in Berlin in 2016, extending the foundation's presence into the German capital and allowing its programme to unfold across both cities, often simultaneously.

Founded and shaped by collector Julia Stoschek, the foundation has organised more than forty exhibitions over its history, alongside numerous international collaborative projects devoted to the presentation, conservation and research of its holdings. The collection itself spans nearly 1,000 works by around 300 artists, ranging from pioneering figures of the 1960s and 1970s such as Bruce Nauman, Carolee Schneemann and VALIE EXPORT to contemporary practitioners including Arthur Jafa, Anne Imhof and Kandis Williams. A Research Room, inaugurated in Dusseldorf in 2021 and later extended to Berlin, gives registered visitors direct access to the collection's complete holdings and its reference library of art historical and theoretical publications, with roughly a third of the collection also accessible online.

The foundation's contemporary importance rests on its sustained commitment to time-based media as a serious and expansive curatorial category, one that has grown, in recent exhibitions such as After Images, to encompass kinetic sculpture, sound and light installation, olfactory work and extended reality alongside film and video. Its curatorial trajectory has consistently paired historical positions with emerging practice, exemplified by its Double Feature series, which presents solo exhibitions by younger artists simultaneously in both Berlin and Dusseldorf, and by major thematic exhibitions such as Worldbuilding, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist for the collection's fifteenth anniversary, which traced the relationship between gaming and contemporary art.

The foundation has also built a distinguished record of collaboration with major museums internationally, including Deichtorhallen Hamburg, ZKM Karlsruhe, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Moderna Museet in Sweden, and Sesc Sao Paulo, extending the reach of its collection well beyond its own walls, most recently with its first major presentation in the United States, staged in Los Angeles in 2026.

The Julia Stoschek Foundation's core organisational pillars are its permanent collection, its dual exhibition programme across Berlin and Dusseldorf, its Research Room and library, and its long-standing academic partnership with the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf. As a privately funded foundation, it is sustained primarily through its founder's continued support, allowing it to pursue an independent, research driven programme dedicated to expanding public understanding of time-based art across generations of artists and audiences.