Julia Stoscheck is collector who is interested above all to the performative practices and procedural research from the Sixties and Seventies and from everything that subsequently turned out to be research linked to the time factor and to the moving image, elements that must be considered an adequate key to reading the modern world, a story, that of a new concept of space-time, which obviously has its origins in film, starting with the Lumière brothers. The works of the Stoschek collection (870 works by 290) include videos, films, single or multi-channel installations, multimedia environments, performances, sound installations and virtual reality.

For the conservation of this incredible set of works (just think of the rapid obsolescence of digital technologies) in 2007 an operational office was opened in Düsseldorf, Germany (JSC Düsseldorf), which was followed in 2016 by a second exhibition space in Berlin (JSC Berlin).

The Julia Stoschek Collection not only welcomes loan requests for works of art, but also invites artists and curators to develop ambitious or highly innovative artistic projects and is also committed to supporting projects around the world. Past collaborations include entities such as: Berliner Festspiele, Berlin; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Kunstsammlung NRW, Dusseldorf; Moderna Museet Malmö; MoMA PS1, New York; Biennale Performa, New York; Serpentine Galleries, London; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; and ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe. The Foundation has also supported exhibition projects; in particular we remember Doug Aitken’s exhibition at MOCA, Los Angeles in 2016; and contributed to the construction of the German Pavilion at the 54th, 56th and 57th Venice Biennale, with Christoph Schlingensief (2011), Hito Steyerl (2015) and Anne Imhof (2017).

The opening of this collection to the public is made possible thanks to the support of the Julia Stoschek Foundation, founded by Julia Stoschek in 2017, for the spirit of patronage and the desire to disseminate contemporary art even towards non-specialists. Furthermore, since 2019, the Foundation hosts an annual summer residency for emerging curators in collaboration with the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard).

Now, the most appropriate way to get a first idea of ​​this incredible collection is to seize the opportunity offered by an exhibition of twelve works curated by Rachel Vera Steinberg and proposed under the title “Mythologists”. The appointment is the third edition of JSC ON VIEW and presents video and sound installations, some of which are exhibited for the first time at JSC Düsseldorf. These are the authors involved: Jamie Crewe, Guerrilla Girls, Mike Kelley, Lina Lapelytė, Mark Leckey, Klara Lidén, Laure Prouvost, Mika Rottenberg, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Jacolby Satterwhite, Wu Tsang, WangShui.

This is how the curator talks about it: “Traditionally understood as narratives about gods, creation and holiness, myths are widely shared and in fact ambiguous stories. They tell unverified truths, educate and entertain at the same time, and create archetypes from simple characters. JSC ON VIEW: MYTHOLOGISTS addresses the tensions created between fact and fiction through the production of personal and collective narratives. The works refer to various mythologies, reinterpreting stories, disrupting established behaviors and imagining new visual and sound worlds. What unites them is that the limits between myth, reality and fantasy are not clear, whether they are the work of the artist or not. Through daily acts of fiction and acting, the works ask: what can be trusted, if anything? How is meaning assigned to these stories? Who creates these myths and which ones will be carried into the future? “

Of course, the myth is linked to the foundation of the world, it stands at the dawn of civilization, it often has incongruous and contradictory meanings and for this reason it lends itself to acting as a magnifying glass of contemporary complexity. Just do not take the word literally and do not expect these works to speak of Athor or Zeus, Indra or Mitra.

Instead, these works focus on subcultures or collective fantasies, on popular archetypes or tropes, on ambiguities and behaviors established by social conventions, to the point of touching utopian worlds capable of forging new relationships and innovative hierarchies.

In short, an exhibition show, where time is still to be considered not only as a term of definition of the individual works, but also as the scrolling of the hands of the clock when one is gripped in front of a moving image that becomes history or simply translates in aesthetic value.

Bruno Sain

Info:

AA.VV., JSC on view: Mythologists, Works From The Julia Stoschek Collection
17/01/2021 – 19/12/2021
JSC Düsseldorf
Schanzenstraße 54
40549 Düsseldorf, Germania
tel. +49.211.585.884.0
mail info@jsc.art