The Julia Stoschek Foundation Berlin has closed. At the end of October 2026 the foundation left the former Czech cultural centre at Leipziger Straße 60 in Mitte, where it had shown time-based art since June 2016. On 11 November it announced the next step: its Düsseldorf headquarters, closed for renovation since 2025, reopens in April 2027 with a show drawn from the collection.
The closure itself was announced in April, a week before Gallery Weekend. The foundation called it a "strategic realignment" and said it would concentrate on Düsseldorf and on projects abroad. It also said it would keep doing temporary projects in Berlin, at changing locations, but there is no fixed address in the city any more.
Ten years of video art on Leipziger Straße
Julia Stoschek, born in 1975 and a shareholder of the car-parts maker Brose, started collecting in 2003. She opened her first space in a former factory building in Düsseldorf-Oberkassel in 2007. The collection now has more than 1,000 works and concentrates on video, film, moving-image installation, performance, sound and virtual reality — work that needs projectors, dark rooms and a lot of space.
The Berlin space opened in 2016 in the former Czech cultural centre, with around 3,000 square metres of exhibition space, much of it dark rooms for projections. It put on 22 solo and group exhibitions. Arthur Jafa, Ian Cheng, Stan Douglas, Ulysses Jenkins and Mark Leckey were among the artists shown. Reports differ on the total number of visitors: Kunstforum and the Berliner Zeitung give more than 450,000, while The Art Newspaper, citing the foundation, says 500,000.
The building belongs to the federal property agency BImA. According to the Berliner Zeitung, Stoschek already thought about leaving around 2020, when the agency asked for a steep rent increase. At the time she complained about the lack of support from the city and the federal government. Berlin's then culture senator Klaus Lederer helped settle the dispute. This year's announcement gave no rent figures. The foundation's own explanation is about reaching an international audience, pointing to What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem, a show of the collection in Los Angeles that drew 30,000 visitors.
What Düsseldorf is planning
The reopened Düsseldorf house, Schanzenstraße 54, marks the foundation's 20th anniversary. The first exhibition, Selfish in Bed, runs from 10 April to 19 December 2027. It shows works by 43 artists from the collection, among them Sarah Lucas, whose 2000 self-portrait gives the show its title, Wolfgang Tillmans, Bill Viola, Rosemarie Trockel and Tracey Emin. The curator is Krist Gruijthuijsen, former director of KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, where Stoschek has sat on the board since 2015. From Berlin the ICE takes a little over four hours.
What it means for visitors: where to see video art in Berlin now
The closure leaves a gap. No other private space in Berlin gave this much room to moving images. You can still see good video art in the city. It is just more spread out:
- Videoart at Midnight at Kino Babylon puts artists' films on a full cinema screen at midnight, free of charge. The next edition shows Daniel Hopp on the night of 13 to 14 November 2026.
- Steve Reinke: Orphan Parade opens at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi on 14 November 2026. Reinke, a Canadian video artist, has made essayistic videos for more than thirty years.
- Hamburger Bahnhof, is the Nationalgalerie's museum for contemporary art and regularly shows film and video from its collection. It lost a private collection of its own in 2021, when the Flick loan ended: see 30 years of the Hamburger Bahnhof. On its anniversary weekend it is open for 30 hours with free entry, and Sophie Calle's exhibition opens there on 13 November.
Good to know
- Berlin space: closed since the end of October 2026. The foundation's Berlin events now take place at temporary venues, announced on its website.
- Düsseldorf: Schanzenstraße 54, 40549 Düsseldorf, reopening 10 April 2027.
- Collection online: the foundation has published an online catalogue of the collection on its website, launched in 2020.
Sources
- The Art Newspaper: Julia Stoschek Foundation to reopen Düsseldorf headquarters in 2027 (11 November 2026)
- Berliner Zeitung: Julia Stoschek verkündet endgültige Schließung ihres Ausstellungshauses in Berlin (25 April 2026)
- Kunstforum International: Julia Stoschek Foundation schließt Berliner Standort (24 April 2026)
- art-in-berlin: Julia Stoschek Foundation schließt ihren Berliner Standort
- Julia Stoschek Foundation
